As Lawrence Jones tells it, the Great New Zealand Novel was ‘most anxiously and fruitlessly anticipated’ in the years between the two world wars – the period of national ‘invention’ – when writers and critics were looking for something big from somewhere small (though not without a complicating sideways glance at our major expatriate miniaturist, Katherine Mansfield). The prognosticators were deluded, of course – and not only for the boosterish reasons documented by Jones. They had failed to detect the appearance of a GNZN in 1920, before one was looked for in earnest. No one was aware the messianic book had arrived – but this is only one of several signs by which a GNZN can be known. For a second, consider the resonance of plot in that novel: Jane Mander's The Story of a New Zealand River. The frostily beautiful Alice Roland and her daughter Asia travel upriver to the ‘appalling isolation’ of her new husband's bush property. It is the late nineteenth century. Also on the raft, and incongruous in this setting, is Alice's piano – an instrument the heroine plays with Chopin-like intensity. Over the time span of the novel, the kauri forests are cleared and a small community takes root around Tom Roland's timber mill. Alice will slowly relinquish her genteel and class-conscious ways, adapt to her new-world environment, and find true love with her husband's foreman, the sensitive David Bruce. Alice, the starchy Puritan, becomes a New Zealander; her daughter, the feisty Asia, becomes the New Zealand woman of the future. In short, The Story of a New Zealand River is an ambitious, feminist-minded birth-of-a-nation story. Moreover, like many classics, the book would find its largest audience outside its own time. In the 1930s and 1940s, a younger generation of writers regarded Mander's achievement as a foundation to build on. In the 1960s, the novel was serialised to acclaim on late morning radio, enthralling housewives and retired folk by the thousand – and millions more would be drawn to the story when Jane Campion reinvented its basic scenario in her Oscar-winning movie, The Piano (1993). But of all the qualifications that might be urged in favour of Mander's novel, the tell-tale sign and most evident symptom of a GNZN is that, truth to tell, The Story of a New Zealand River is not so much great as minor but worthy.