Christchurch was Essie Summers’ home before her marriage. She was familiar with its city landmarks, such as Captain Scott’s statue, the Avon River and the Botanic Gardens. Those features and many more frame this group of novels.
In The Time and the Place, romance develops at an inner city school with strong English traditions. One such school for boys is still based within the city’s four avenues.
While a newspaper office in Christchurch is the workplace environment for No Orchids by Request, the heroine also visits Banks Peninsula. This novel is the first of several Summers wrote featuring a significant location she called ‘Harvest Moon Bay’, close to the cottage where she spent her honeymoon.
The eponymous heroine of Revolt and Virginia leaves Dunedin and her position as an advertising copywriter in a drapery to make a new life as a freelance journalist in Christchurch. Even in her new home in the suburb of Richmond she encounters problems from the past but finds her future in the city.
