ABSTRACT
The choice of Mary Taylor for a sample biography must at first seem incongruous in a study dealing mainly with the emigration of distressed gentlewomen. According to the contemporary sense of the term Mary Taylor could not qualify as distressed either in an economic or psychological sense. His descendants rose to greater prominence as cloth manufacturers during the eighteenth century. Mary Taylor inherited her father's inclination for a personal religion and contempt for organised church hierarchies. It is precisely in this area the opportunities for work and the attitude towards it that the parallels between the lives of Mary Taylor and other middle-class emigrants are so striking. Despite all her special advantages and her unconventional ideas her attitude towards work in New Zealand was characteristic of that adopted by many others when exposed to a colonial environment.
