Duckworth, Marilyn
Entry updated 13 April 2026. Tagged: Author.
(1935- ) New Zealand author and poet, in UK with her family from 1939 to 1947, whose novel A Gap in the Spectrum (1959) is a tale of disorientation and perhaps Amnesia or false memory. The nineteen-year-old female protagonist awakes in London with a sense that the City and the world are unfamiliar; that she hails from another country called Micald – somehow blander and more insipid – where her Perceptions of air and water were subtly different and the colour red did not exist (hence the title). There she had no parents but now she does. Apparently she is from New Zealand, merely holidaying in London, and engaged to an unknown man in New Zealand who sends troubling letters. The influence of Existentialism has been suggested. A Gap in the Spectrum was adapted for Radio New Zealand in 1972. Duckworth received the OBE for services to literature in 1987. [DRL]
Marilyn Rose Duckworth [née Adcock]
born Auckland, New Zealand: 10 November 1935
works (highly selected)
- A Gap in the Spectrum (London: Hutchinson, 1959) [in the publisher's New Authors Limited series: hb/Owen Wood]
links
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