Hélène Barcynska

07 October 1887 - 10 March 1964

HB was a prolific popular novelist of the twentieth century, who had her greatest successes before and after the First World War and was still publishing after the second. Her autobiography, issued in 1941, lists thirty-eight novels she issued as Oliver Sandys (plus six films) and twenty-one she issued as Countess Barcynska (five filmed).

Barcynska, Hélène. Full and Frank: The Private Life of a Woman Novelist. Hurst and Blackett, 1941.

prelims

Her stories show inventiveness (as well as borrowing from life) and ingenuity. Her total output of novels may be a hundred and thirty,

Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

but library catalogues do not capture all the likely attributions. She also published short stories, further memoirs (one of them an account of mystical or faith-healing experience), and a biography of her second husband.

Milestones

7 October 1886 or 1887

Marguerite Florence Laura Jervis (whose later pseudonyms included that of Countess Barcynska ) was born at Henzada in Burma (then part of British India), the eldest of three surviving children.

The Feminist Companion dates her birth significantly later, in 1894.

Barcynska, Hélène. Full and Frank: The Private Life of a Woman Novelist. Hurst and Blackett, 1941.

Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Summer 1911

The earliest dated Oliver Sandys novel, The Woman in the Firelight, was finished a few weeks after Marguerite Jervis 's wedding, using the idea of a good woman's bad life which her husband had vetoed.

Barcynska, Hélène. Full and Frank: The Private Life of a Woman Novelist. Hurst and Blackett, 1941.

66-7, 85

By May 1928

Writing as Oliver Sandys, HB published another novel, Vista, the Dancer, dedicated to Kitty Cunningham , for her loyalty and devotion.

TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012].

1370 (3 May 1928): 337

Barcynska, Hélène. Vista, The Dancer. Hurst and Blackett, 1928.

prelims

10 March 1964

HB died of heart failure at Shrewsbury Hospital.

Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

By early July 1964

HB 's final, posthumous novel was again issued as by Oliver Sandys: it is Madame Adastra, set largely in the world of hospitals and nursing.

Dated from Bodleian Library accession stamp.

British Library Catalogue.

Biography

The person who later wrote as Countess Barcynska and as Oliver Sandys was given many names at her christening, and later used many others.

HB wrote that the first element in Oliver Sandys, her own chosen pseudonym, came from Maggy Oliver, the imaginary childhood playmate whom she constructed from her reflection in the mirror. She became thoroughly identified with this name.