Margery Lawrence
Margery Lawrence | |
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Born | 8 August 1889 Fantasy fiction, Horror fiction, Detective fiction |
Margery Lawrence (8 August 1889 – 13 November 1969) was an English
Life and work
She was born Margery Harriet Lawrence, in Wolverhampton. Her father was solicitor Richard J. Lawrence, her mother was called Grace, and she had at least two siblings Allan and Monica.[2] Her father published her early poetry in Songs of Childhood, and Other Verses, in 1913. Her poem "Arabian Serenade" was set to music by composer Edward Elgar in 1914.[3]
Lawrence was also an illustrator, and produced drawings for The Hills of Ruel, and Other Stories (1921) by Fiona MacLeod.[1]
Her earliest collections, the Round Table sequence, include Nights of the Round Table (1926) and The Terraces of Night (1932). Stefan Dziemianowicz describes these stories as "simple but solidly told tales of horror and the supernatural that are mindful of the classic ghost story tradition but adorned with enough contemporary flourishes" to demonstrate that Lawrence was comfortable working variants on this tradition.
During the 1920s she wrote general fiction, and her 1925 romance novel Red Heels was filmed by the Austrian film company Sascha Film as Das Spielzeug von Paris. A list of Lawrence's published novels to 1945 includes: Miss Brandt, Adventuress; Red Heels; Bohemian Glass; Drums of Youth; Silken Sarah; The Madonna of Seven Moons; Madam Holle; The Crooked Smile; Overture to Life; The Bridge of Wonder; and Step Light, Lady.
In 1941, she published another collection of short fiction, Strange Caravan (Robert Hale, 1941). A list of her short stories to 1945 also includes: Snapdragon; and The Floating Cafe.
Her best-known supernatural works include
The Rent in the Veil is a fantasy involving a time slip to Ancient Rome, and Bride of Darkness is a tale of witchcraft in the modern world.[1]
In the foreword to Ferry Over Jordan (Psychic Book Club, 1944), Lawrence explains that during the latter part of 1941 she had written a further group of articles on Spiritualism for Psychic News. It was the resulting large number of inquiries that prompted editor
"My interest in it dates actually from the moment when I saw a near relation three nights after he died, when he gave me specific instructions about the finding of a box containing important papers. They were found precisely where he said--and from that moment I became deeply interested in what, throughout this book, I have called the "Other Side". Somewhere that man was obviously still alive! Somewhere he was thinking of us, anxious to help, caring what happened; in a word, he was still alive somewhere, and I was determined to find out where" [foreword, p. 5].
Select bibliography
- Miss Brandt, Adventuress (1923)
- Red Heels (1924)
- Nights of the Round Table (1926)
- Bohemian Glass (1928)
- Drums of Youth (1929)
- Snapdragon (1931)
- The Madonna of Seven Moons (1931)
- Madam Holle (1934)
- The Crooked Smile (1935)
- The Floating Cafe (1936)
- The Bridge of Wonder (1939)
- Step Light, Lady (1942)
- Number Seven, Queer Street (1945)
- Cardboard Castle (1951)
- The Rent in the Veil (1951)
- Evil Harvest (1954)
- The Tomorrow of Yesterday (1966)
- Bride of Darkness (1967)
- Over My Shoulder (1968)
- The Green Bough (1968)
- Autumn Rose (1971)
Notes
- ^ ISBN 0313327742(p. 698-700).
- ^ 1891 and 1901 England censuses
- ^ "Arabian Serenade (Elgar, Edward)". IMSLP. Retrieved 1 March 2022.
References
- ISBN 0-312-15897-1.
- Lawrence, Margery (1944). Ferry Over Jordan. London: Psychic Book Club Ltd.
- Lawrence, Margery (1945). Robert Hale Limited.
- Lawrence, Margery (1969). Number Seven, Queer Street. Sauk City, WI: Mycroft & Moran.
- Bibliography http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/l/margery-lawrence/