Romer Wilson

26 December 1891 - 11 January 1930

During a brief writing career (almost entirely limited to the 1920s) RW wrote produced novels, two novellas, a play, a biography, and a posthumously published collection of short stories. She compiled and edited three volumes of fairy tales from around the world. Her novels, highly philosophical and sometimes lyrically overblown, treat the existential and epistemological dilemmas facing postwar Europe. Many of her protagonists are artists or philosophers struggling to achieve or understand perfection in a world riven with suffering and imperfection. She often explores the impact of love and the effects on society of war or of mechanisation, in fiction which suggests a longing for a pre-industrial pastoral past.

Milestones

26 December 1891

Florence Roma Muir Wilson (who later wrote as RW) was born at 30 Collegiate Crescent, Ecclesall, in Yorkshire, near Sheffield.

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

By 3 May 1921

RW received high praise for The Death of Society: Conte de Fée Premier, which won her the Hawthornden Prize for this year.

Woolf, Virginia. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Bell, Anne Olivier and Andrew McNeillieEditors , Hogarth Press, 1984.

2: 116 and 116n3

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

OCLC WorldCat.

11 January 1930

RW died of tuberculosis at Lausanne in Switzerland.

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

Biography

Birth and Family

26 December 1891

Florence Roma Muir Wilson (who later wrote as RW) was born at 30 Collegiate Crescent, Ecclesall, in Yorkshire, near Sheffield.

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