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All Her Lives: Nine Stories
What if the choices of women centuries apart could echo across time? A sister haunted by her return from war. A young woman discovering her identity at a Berlin rave in the mid-2000s. A mother whose son' s climate activism threatens everything she' s built. At the heart of these fictional stories is Mary Wollstonecraft, the radical 18th-century feminist whose own struggles with love, loss and revolution illuminate the threads that connect all their lives. From quiet moments of caregiving and curiosity to acts of bold rebellion, the women in this striking story collection navigate the eternal tensions between duty and desire, safety and freedom, the past they' ve inherited and the future they' re determined to create. All Her Lives brings together extraordinary women fighting to define themselves on their own terms.
- GenresShort Stories
259 pages, Kindle Edition
First published October 9, 2025
About the author
Ingrid Horrocks
9 books8 followersI am a nonfiction writer, critic and poet from Aotearoa New Zealand. My latest book, Where We Swim, a blend of memoir, travel and nature writing, is published in New Zealand and Australian editions in 2021.
My previous books include the genre-bending Travelling with Augusta: 1835 and 1999, part memoir, part love story, part history of women’s travel. I’m pretty obsessed with what happens to people on the move and I’ve written a book on the history of women wanderers in fiction, poetry and travel books, Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility. As part of this, I got to edit a new edition of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft’s dazzling 1796 travel book. I’ve also published two poetry books, and co-edited a collection of personal essays, Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on Place for Aotearoa New Zealand.
Awards for my writing include a Michael King Writers Residency and the Macmillan Brown Prize for Writers. I was a Commonwealth Scholar, did a PhD at Princeton University, and am now an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Massey University, Wellington. I am a member of the NonfictioNOW International Board, currently organising NonfictioNOW2021, to be held in Wellington in December 2021. I am especially interested in building Trans-Tasman literary connections and am a Consultant NZ-Aotearoa Editor to the Sydney Review of Books.
I live in Te Whanganui a Tara, Wellington, near the south coast, with my partner and twin daughters. I’m a keen, if not a very good, swimmer.
My previous books include the genre-bending Travelling with Augusta: 1835 and 1999, part memoir, part love story, part history of women’s travel. I’m pretty obsessed with what happens to people on the move and I’ve written a book on the history of women wanderers in fiction, poetry and travel books, Women Wanderers and the Writing of Mobility. As part of this, I got to edit a new edition of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft’s dazzling 1796 travel book. I’ve also published two poetry books, and co-edited a collection of personal essays, Extraordinary Anywhere: Essays on Place for Aotearoa New Zealand.
Awards for my writing include a Michael King Writers Residency and the Macmillan Brown Prize for Writers. I was a Commonwealth Scholar, did a PhD at Princeton University, and am now an Associate Professor in Creative Writing at Massey University, Wellington. I am a member of the NonfictioNOW International Board, currently organising NonfictioNOW2021, to be held in Wellington in December 2021. I am especially interested in building Trans-Tasman literary connections and am a Consultant NZ-Aotearoa Editor to the Sydney Review of Books.
I live in Te Whanganui a Tara, Wellington, near the south coast, with my partner and twin daughters. I’m a keen, if not a very good, swimmer.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 13, 2026
The short story collections coming out of NZ these days are brilliant and this one was no exception. Stellar writing and some interesting topics covered. Stories 'The Usual Spiel' and 'Mumurations' very cleverly showed the complexity of human emotions and our internal conflicts.
What a treat to read a story set in my local neighborhood too.
What a treat to read a story set in my local neighborhood too.
April 26, 2026
All Her Lives is a short story collection themed in a way similar to Laura Elvery's Ordinary Matter (2020, see my review). Both collections are inspired by iconic women whose work has altered history and changed the lives of millions of women.
While Ordinary Matter links women who've won the Nobel Prize for Sciences into stories of inspiration, motherhood, sacrifice and legacy, All Her Lives is inspired by the 18th century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and Laura Jean Mackay describes it as a protest song book, calling through the ages for change, revolution and peace.
The first story, 'Evie on Branch' turned out to be well-timed for Anzac Day. Set in 1919, it inverts the more common characterisation of a soldier's homecoming to the story of Evie, home from service as a nurse in WW1. Much has changed on the family farm in her absence. Her brother Finn, too disabled by an accident to enlist, has married and become a father, and he and his wife Mae are sleeping in the master bedroom since their father died, very suddenly of cancer.
Finn's other news during her absence is commonplace:
Evie, however, is irrevocably changed. She has seen things and had experiences that she could not convey in letters home. Nursing the black lesions of wounded men when she knew there was only one end to the stench of gangrene. She realises, before Finn does, that he will have to adjust to a new reality too.
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2026/04/26/a...
While Ordinary Matter links women who've won the Nobel Prize for Sciences into stories of inspiration, motherhood, sacrifice and legacy, All Her Lives is inspired by the 18th century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and Laura Jean Mackay describes it as a protest song book, calling through the ages for change, revolution and peace.The first story, 'Evie on Branch' turned out to be well-timed for Anzac Day. Set in 1919, it inverts the more common characterisation of a soldier's homecoming to the story of Evie, home from service as a nurse in WW1. Much has changed on the family farm in her absence. Her brother Finn, too disabled by an accident to enlist, has married and become a father, and he and his wife Mae are sleeping in the master bedroom since their father died, very suddenly of cancer.
Both letters — the one saying he was ill and the one saying he was dead — had arrived at the same time, blurry and incomprehensible in her unsteady hands as she sat in the field tent and the other nurses moved around her, shaking out clothes, setting out their belongings. Unable to take it in, she had stood, mechanically unpacked, made up her bed, readied herself for the work she had come to do. (p.6)
Finn's other news during her absence is commonplace:
... she tried to rouse herself by asking what he'd done with the farm in her absence. There was now a workers' whare [a communal house] and a frame had gone up for another small dwelling, which the neighbours were helping to build for another family. The man had a job working the homestead garden over the river; the wife would be company for Mae. The two milking cows in the home paddock were new as well. Finn had plans for a herd and a proper milking operation. (p.7)
Evie, however, is irrevocably changed. She has seen things and had experiences that she could not convey in letters home. Nursing the black lesions of wounded men when she knew there was only one end to the stench of gangrene. She realises, before Finn does, that he will have to adjust to a new reality too.
She understood the blood-soaked crying, the terrible fear of the returned men — more than Finn ever could, here in his domestic clearing, felling trees and putting up fences. More for that matter, than most of the wives of those men. (p.16)
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2026/04/26/a...
January 3, 2026
Great! I love this in-between genre: long short stories but not quite novellas. I adored how the characters in each were somehow connected. Sometimes a little too on-the-nose/prescriptive abt climate stuff, which is a pet peeve of mine… In the end, the storytelling mellowed it all out enough for me to love it!
March 7, 2026
Really enjoyed these stories but the Mary Wollstonecraft ones felt a little out of place.
May 9, 2026
You can often tell a lot about a book from its first sentence. What does it attempt, and how? A good sentence might make you feel - might make you go mmm! Another good sentence might make you think - might make you go hmm. Others leave no trace.
Horrocks' first sentence is this:
'They left the station behind, taking off in the truck along the straights of the main road, and the mountain ranges unfurled in the distance alongside.'
Not terrible, but not great. For the first sentence of a book, it isn't promising. It doesn't make you go mmm or hmm. The 'straights of the main road' tells us that the road is straight. But wouldn't we have imagined that anyway? And why straights in the plural? It's not clear and it's not clear it's important. Then you have the 'mountain ranges unfurled in the distance alongside'. Unfurl in the context of a view is a cliché. It would have made more sense if the road was curved, the view becoming visible as you rounded a corner, seeming to unroll. But as it is – and it is 'straights' - one has the image of going along a perfectly straight road and more mountain ranges popping up on the horizon, as in the draw distance settings of a video game.
This first sentence is typical of Horrocks's prose. It feels deliberate, or rather laboured, but its effects are not always clear and they are rarely strong. Later in this story, a character says her old life is 'as imaginary as starlight'. This is one of few analogies in the spare prose of this book, but it doesn't really make sense. Starlight, imaginary? Don't stars famously twinkle and glitter with light? The analogy works better in the sense of the character's old life being as inaccessible to her as starlight, but that's not what H has written: she's written imaginary -and that just doesn't make sense.
Other sentences are actively belaboured. A section opens with this line:
'On the way to the central library, where I want to pick up a book, I take us on a detour to look at the old oak.'
Why not, I take her to look at the old oak? If we must have the library (because the character is studious), can the reader not to be trusted to assume that in going to the library, the character might want to pick up or return a book?
This is a book of denotative sentences. H. seems to have absorbed the idea that to be 'realistic', one's prose must be as plain as everyday speech. The test seems to be, would a person on the street actually say something like this? But good writing is a very heightened version of everyday life and a more worked style doesn't preclude realism. The great realist writing is deeply stylised, as in Steinbeck or Hemingway, or even Woolf and Mansfield. By writing so plainly, books like All Her Lives deliberately deprive themselves of one avenue of readerly interest: a lively and propulsive style which in itself throws up interesting observations about the world. Interesting hmmms and mmmms.
That denotative style might be forgivable if a lot was happening. For example, many popular genre works, thrillers or fantasy books or scifi, use a simple style because the content they're transmitting is so complex, or so odd, or so intense, that a high style would be distracting. That's not the case here, where very little happens. We are meant to have an impression of sublimated emotion, of still ponds roiling beneath the surface. Instead, there is just flatness: flat sentences, flat characters, and even flat plots. H. does not seem to ever want to write at the centre of the action, to throw her characters directly into conflict. Everything is sidelong. The most interesting things that happen in this book we hear about at one or two removes, sucking drama and interest out of the stories.
The flatness in style and plot render the characters almost interchangeable. Short stories have to work quickly to characterise their players, either through style and voice, or through action and plot. With so little of any of that, H. seems to expect us to do it all ourselves. She does, though, give us blunt exposition in sentences like 'A man's allowed to make a fuss of his big sister's homecoming'. New scenes are introduced with inelegant devices: 'Remember mother's reaction when she heard us shouting at each other about the weakling ward?' (cue scene of their mother reacting to them shouting about the weakling ward).
H.'s characters are given feminist credentials or instincts sometimes at odds with their setting. We follow good women - good, as in, they think like we do in 2026. (Wouldn't it have been more interesting if the Plunkett story had its character be complicit in Truby King's eugenicist programme, instead of just unaware of it, somehow unaware of race science, in spite of being so studious and informed, and so involved with the Doctor?). That the past might be a foreign country, and past women foreign to our sense of womanhood today, is an idea H. refuses. We have easy access to these old minds and their concerns because the necessary oddities (and interests) of historical distance have been shorn away. We are not, as readers, asked to do anything as radical as engage with characters we might not understand, or dislike, or that might be morally complex. No, these are good women. Good white women. It is really All Horrocks's Lives. Lives pruned of texture that we can process easily, like eating toast after nausea.
In a lot of contemporary literature, there is a certain nausea about style. About making things up, even. In this book, too, is an unwillingness to invent, to entertain. It is a deeply cautious book, even structurally – even with its 'risky' inclusion of Wollstonecraft. Everywhere, H. takes the formed path over the craggy slip, clings to the railing instead of taking the leap.
If risk raises the temperature on both the writer and the reader, All Her Lives continually chooses to lower it. We feel the chill from the sentence, all the way up.
Horrocks' first sentence is this:
'They left the station behind, taking off in the truck along the straights of the main road, and the mountain ranges unfurled in the distance alongside.'
Not terrible, but not great. For the first sentence of a book, it isn't promising. It doesn't make you go mmm or hmm. The 'straights of the main road' tells us that the road is straight. But wouldn't we have imagined that anyway? And why straights in the plural? It's not clear and it's not clear it's important. Then you have the 'mountain ranges unfurled in the distance alongside'. Unfurl in the context of a view is a cliché. It would have made more sense if the road was curved, the view becoming visible as you rounded a corner, seeming to unroll. But as it is – and it is 'straights' - one has the image of going along a perfectly straight road and more mountain ranges popping up on the horizon, as in the draw distance settings of a video game.
This first sentence is typical of Horrocks's prose. It feels deliberate, or rather laboured, but its effects are not always clear and they are rarely strong. Later in this story, a character says her old life is 'as imaginary as starlight'. This is one of few analogies in the spare prose of this book, but it doesn't really make sense. Starlight, imaginary? Don't stars famously twinkle and glitter with light? The analogy works better in the sense of the character's old life being as inaccessible to her as starlight, but that's not what H has written: she's written imaginary -and that just doesn't make sense.
Other sentences are actively belaboured. A section opens with this line:
'On the way to the central library, where I want to pick up a book, I take us on a detour to look at the old oak.'
Why not, I take her to look at the old oak? If we must have the library (because the character is studious), can the reader not to be trusted to assume that in going to the library, the character might want to pick up or return a book?
This is a book of denotative sentences. H. seems to have absorbed the idea that to be 'realistic', one's prose must be as plain as everyday speech. The test seems to be, would a person on the street actually say something like this? But good writing is a very heightened version of everyday life and a more worked style doesn't preclude realism. The great realist writing is deeply stylised, as in Steinbeck or Hemingway, or even Woolf and Mansfield. By writing so plainly, books like All Her Lives deliberately deprive themselves of one avenue of readerly interest: a lively and propulsive style which in itself throws up interesting observations about the world. Interesting hmmms and mmmms.
That denotative style might be forgivable if a lot was happening. For example, many popular genre works, thrillers or fantasy books or scifi, use a simple style because the content they're transmitting is so complex, or so odd, or so intense, that a high style would be distracting. That's not the case here, where very little happens. We are meant to have an impression of sublimated emotion, of still ponds roiling beneath the surface. Instead, there is just flatness: flat sentences, flat characters, and even flat plots. H. does not seem to ever want to write at the centre of the action, to throw her characters directly into conflict. Everything is sidelong. The most interesting things that happen in this book we hear about at one or two removes, sucking drama and interest out of the stories.
The flatness in style and plot render the characters almost interchangeable. Short stories have to work quickly to characterise their players, either through style and voice, or through action and plot. With so little of any of that, H. seems to expect us to do it all ourselves. She does, though, give us blunt exposition in sentences like 'A man's allowed to make a fuss of his big sister's homecoming'. New scenes are introduced with inelegant devices: 'Remember mother's reaction when she heard us shouting at each other about the weakling ward?' (cue scene of their mother reacting to them shouting about the weakling ward).
H.'s characters are given feminist credentials or instincts sometimes at odds with their setting. We follow good women - good, as in, they think like we do in 2026. (Wouldn't it have been more interesting if the Plunkett story had its character be complicit in Truby King's eugenicist programme, instead of just unaware of it, somehow unaware of race science, in spite of being so studious and informed, and so involved with the Doctor?). That the past might be a foreign country, and past women foreign to our sense of womanhood today, is an idea H. refuses. We have easy access to these old minds and their concerns because the necessary oddities (and interests) of historical distance have been shorn away. We are not, as readers, asked to do anything as radical as engage with characters we might not understand, or dislike, or that might be morally complex. No, these are good women. Good white women. It is really All Horrocks's Lives. Lives pruned of texture that we can process easily, like eating toast after nausea.
In a lot of contemporary literature, there is a certain nausea about style. About making things up, even. In this book, too, is an unwillingness to invent, to entertain. It is a deeply cautious book, even structurally – even with its 'risky' inclusion of Wollstonecraft. Everywhere, H. takes the formed path over the craggy slip, clings to the railing instead of taking the leap.
If risk raises the temperature on both the writer and the reader, All Her Lives continually chooses to lower it. We feel the chill from the sentence, all the way up.
May 21, 2026
Once again, my Chief Reading Enabler has drawn my attention to a book that I needed to read and, once read, needed to own a copy of. Here’s Lisa’s review: All Her Lives, Nine Stories (2025), by Ingrid Horrocks | ANZ LitLovers LitBlog https://anzlitlovers.com/2026/04/26/a...
And yes, it intrigued me to think about the ways in which women’s lives are lived.
Some of these nine short stories are connected and some held my attention more than others. Three stories in particular have held my attention. One because of a family link, the other two because of their content.
‘Marvellous Instruments’ had echoes even before I read the ‘Notes’. As I am writing these comments, I have a copy of Mary Truby King’s ‘Mothercraft’ next to me. My grandmother bought (or was given) this book on 13 September 1934, my mother’s first birthday. I have read the book several times and while I certainly didn’t refer to it often when my own son was a baby in the early 1980s, I recognise the gulf between accepted child rearing wisdom separated by five decades. And, back in the story, I see these same ideas on a much more industrial scale.
‘Murmuration’ takes Madeline from New Zealand to the UK to visit her son Daniel who has been imprisoned because of a climate activist stunt. Madeline wonders about her role in shaping Daniel’s activism and mourns the loss of their initial parent-child bond. Can it be Madeline’s fault that Daniel has been imprisoned, or can the world be blamed more broadly?
‘Concrete Box’ may be set in a New Zealand housing crisis, but I remember similar housing crises here in Australia half a century ago, as well as now. I know these people.
As I read through each story, I thought about the changes each of the women faced. In ‘Evie on Branch’, Evie has returned to New Zealand after nursing in World War I. Her brother Finn could not enlist because of a disability. Evie returns to a world which expects her to fit back into a role as though war had not happened.
For me, the two stories involving Mary Wollstonecraft (‘The Silver Ship’ and ‘The Silver Ship II’) were not such a neat fit. I acknowledge that they fit neatly within the theme about the choices of women but while the choices may be familiar, I was too focussed on the setting to appreciate the connections.
Perhaps, when I reread the stories, I will form a different view.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
And yes, it intrigued me to think about the ways in which women’s lives are lived.
Some of these nine short stories are connected and some held my attention more than others. Three stories in particular have held my attention. One because of a family link, the other two because of their content.
‘Marvellous Instruments’ had echoes even before I read the ‘Notes’. As I am writing these comments, I have a copy of Mary Truby King’s ‘Mothercraft’ next to me. My grandmother bought (or was given) this book on 13 September 1934, my mother’s first birthday. I have read the book several times and while I certainly didn’t refer to it often when my own son was a baby in the early 1980s, I recognise the gulf between accepted child rearing wisdom separated by five decades. And, back in the story, I see these same ideas on a much more industrial scale.
‘Murmuration’ takes Madeline from New Zealand to the UK to visit her son Daniel who has been imprisoned because of a climate activist stunt. Madeline wonders about her role in shaping Daniel’s activism and mourns the loss of their initial parent-child bond. Can it be Madeline’s fault that Daniel has been imprisoned, or can the world be blamed more broadly?
‘Concrete Box’ may be set in a New Zealand housing crisis, but I remember similar housing crises here in Australia half a century ago, as well as now. I know these people.
As I read through each story, I thought about the changes each of the women faced. In ‘Evie on Branch’, Evie has returned to New Zealand after nursing in World War I. Her brother Finn could not enlist because of a disability. Evie returns to a world which expects her to fit back into a role as though war had not happened.
For me, the two stories involving Mary Wollstonecraft (‘The Silver Ship’ and ‘The Silver Ship II’) were not such a neat fit. I acknowledge that they fit neatly within the theme about the choices of women but while the choices may be familiar, I was too focussed on the setting to appreciate the connections.
Perhaps, when I reread the stories, I will form a different view.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
May 14, 2026
A short story collection from an NZ author where characters are connected through time and/or place.
As with any collection, different stories will appeal to readers at different levels. I thought some of the endings were somewhat ambiguous until I read later stories to see a link.
All Her Lives follows women across generations as they resist, nurture and transform. These are lives shaped by love and politics, motherhood and memory, constraint and defiance. From girls raised in the garden of Plunket founder Truby King, to a queer university student at a mid-2000s Berlin rave, to a mother facing the cost of her son’s climate rebellion, the women of All Her Lives are complex, resilient and deeply human. Shadowing their stories is the early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, whose journey of grief and revolution will become a vessel for what endures – and for finding hope. Vast and intimate, All Her Lives explores the layered selfhood of women – all that they inherit, sacrifice, imagine and carry forward – and the power found in unravelling and reweaving those selves on their own terms.
As with any collection, different stories will appeal to readers at different levels. I thought some of the endings were somewhat ambiguous until I read later stories to see a link.
All Her Lives follows women across generations as they resist, nurture and transform. These are lives shaped by love and politics, motherhood and memory, constraint and defiance. From girls raised in the garden of Plunket founder Truby King, to a queer university student at a mid-2000s Berlin rave, to a mother facing the cost of her son’s climate rebellion, the women of All Her Lives are complex, resilient and deeply human. Shadowing their stories is the early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, whose journey of grief and revolution will become a vessel for what endures – and for finding hope. Vast and intimate, All Her Lives explores the layered selfhood of women – all that they inherit, sacrifice, imagine and carry forward – and the power found in unravelling and reweaving those selves on their own terms.
February 7, 2026
An absorbing, immersive and powerful collection of stories, each one allowing depth and digression in length to add valuable substance to the narrative. The themes and characters are diverse and finely rendered. Horrocks has a skill in deftly capturing interrelationships and the dynamics and nuances that sit within. Admiration in the way she covers such a broad landscape of themes and situations that are easily relatable too. So well bought out in her ‘The Silver Ship’ and ‘Murmuration’, an absolute gem!
Looking forward to further writings of this highly accomplished New Zealand author.
Looking forward to further writings of this highly accomplished New Zealand author.
April 19, 2026
I'm not a fan of short stories and these were not my style
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews