Margery Lawrence

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.