Margery Lawrence

08 August 1889 - 13 November 1969

A twentieth-century writer of popular fiction, ML published nearly thirty novels in a wide range of genres, including adventure-romance and novels of the supernatural. The generic boundaries of her novels are fluid, and many verge on horror or on ghost and fantasy fiction. Female sexuality looms large in her work and she often places female characters in impossible predicaments, often involving social convention, money, or class. Her nine short story collections, like her novels, are deeply informed by her Spiritualist beliefs. They involve mediums—human vehicles through which spirits communicate with the living—and the materialisation of connections between the living and the dead through ghostly visions or communication. ML claimed that much of her Spiritualist fiction is based on real-life experience—either her own or that of first-hand witnesses. She also published two studies on Spiritualism and an autobiography in verse.

Milestones

8 August 1889

ML was born in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire; it is unknown whether she had siblings.

The Feminist Companion mistakenly locates her birth in Shropshire.

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.

Several sources give her birth date as 1896, in which they are probably relying on her own implication, in the table of contents to Fourteen to Forty-Eight, that she was fourteen in 1910. A John Lawrence born in Wolverhampton on 18 September 1892 may or may not have been a brother.

“FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service”. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

1913

ML first appeared in print when her father published her volume of early poetry, Songs of Childhood, and Other Verses.

The Feminist Companion says she was sixteen at the time of publication, having dated her birth to 1896. She was actually born in 1889 and was thus twenty-four when this book appeared. The title Songs of Childhood was also used by Laurence Alma Tadema , 1902, and Walter de la Mare , 1916.

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.

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.

Lawrence, Margery, and Shane Leslie. Fourteen to Forty-Eight. Robert Hale.

19-23

Leslie, Shane, and Margery Lawrence. “Foreword”. Fourteen to Forty-Eight, Robert Hale, pp. 13-15.

13-14

“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.

1945

ML 's regular publisher, Robert Hale , printed the first of her occult-detective stories featuring the detective Miles Pennoyer: Number Seven, Queer Street.

“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.

Lawrence, Margery. Number Seven, Queer Street. Mycroft and Moran.

prelims

13 November 1969

ML died in London; the cause appears not to be known.

“Contemporary Authors”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Centre-LRC.

1971

ML 's final novel, Autumn Rose, appeared more than a year after her death.

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.

Biography

Birth and Family

8 August 1889

ML was born in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire; it is unknown whether she had siblings.

The Feminist Companion mistakenly locates her birth in Shropshire.

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.

“FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service”. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.