May Edginton

01 March 1884 - 17 June 1957

ME was a novelist popular in her day who published more than fifty romances between 1909 and 1955, besides serials, short stories, and plays. Several of her plays did well on stage. One of her novels was filmed, and another gave rise to a musical and a movie which won fame for themselves though not for her.

BirthName: Helen Marion Edginton
Self-constructed: Helen M. Edginton
She used this form of her birth name to sign the register at her wedding.
Married: Baily
Pseudonym: May Edginton
Indexed: H. M. Edginton; Helen Marion Edginton Baily; Helen May Baily
ME gave these two extra forms of her married name to the US Catalog of Copyright Entries (Renewals) in registering her pseudonym as May Edginton.
“US Catalog of Copyright Entries (Renewals)”. Kingkong.

Milestones

1883 or 1884

Helen Marion Edginton (who later wrote under several forms of her name, but usually as May Edginton) was born.

The Feminist Companion dates her birth as 1883, but it was registered in March 1884, at Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire.

The Trustees of FreeBMD,. FreeBMD. http://www.freebmd.org.uk/.

Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.

By early October 1914

ME issued under her usual pseudonym her most popular novel: Oh! James! The Story of a Man Who Tried to Prove the Goodness of the World, about a businessman, constantly making money, who tries to do good with it.

Kemp, Sandra et al. Edwardian Fiction: An Oxford Companion. Oxford University Press, 1997.

113

TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012]. http://www.gale.com/c/the-times-literary-supplement-historical-archive.

663 (1 October 1914): 437

1955

After a writing career of more than forty-five years, ME published her last novel, Two Lost Sheep, under this usual pseudonym.

The Bodleian catalogue gives this title as Two Lost Sleep.

British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.

17 June 1957

ME died at Rondebosch, South Africa, two years after the appearance of her final novel.

“Miss May Edginton”. Times, 20 June 1957, p. 16.

Biography

Birth and Background

1883 or 1884

Helen Marion Edginton (who later wrote under several forms of her name, but usually as May Edginton) was born.

The Feminist Companion dates her birth as 1883, but it was registered in March 1884, at Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire.

The Trustees of FreeBMD,. FreeBMD. http://www.freebmd.org.uk/.

Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.