22 Facts About Marjorie Pickthall

Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall was a Canadian writer who was born in England but lived in Canada from the time she was seven.

Marjorie Pickthall was born in 1883 in the west London district of Gunnersbury, to Arthur Christie Pickthall, a surveyor and the son of a Church of England clergyman, and Elizabeth Helen Mary Pickthall, daughter of an officer in the Royal Navy, part Irish and part Huguenot.

Marjorie Pickthall's parents encouraged her artistic talents with lessons in drawing and music; an accomplished violinist, she continued studying the instrument until she was twenty.

Marjorie Pickthall was educated at the Church of England day school on Beverley Street in Toronto, and from 1899 at the Bishop Strachan School.

Marjorie Pickthall developed her skills at composition and made lasting friendships at these schools, despite poor health and suffering from headaches, dental, eye and back problems.

Marjorie Pickthall sold her first story, "Two-Ears", to the Toronto Globe for $3 in 1898, when she was still a student at Bishop Strachan.

Marjorie Pickthall began publishing her work regularly in the college magazine, Acta Victoriana.

Marjorie Pickthall introduced her to Sir Andrew Macphail, editor of the prestigious University Magazine, who began regularly printing her poetry from 1907 on.

In 1905 Marjorie Pickthall hired a New York agent, and soon began appearing in American magazines like the Atlantic Monthly, The Century Magazine, Harper's, McClure's, and Scribner's.

Marjorie Pickthall was devastated by her mother's death in February 1910.

Later that year, determined to see some of the world, Marjorie Pickthall went to England.

In England, Marjorie Pickthall first stayed with her uncle, Dr Frank Reginald Mallard, in Hammersmith and then began renting Chalke Cottage in Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, with her second cousin Edith Emma Whillier.

Marjorie Pickthall began writing again and in 1914 wrote the historical novel Poursuite Joyeuse, which was published in 1915 as Little Hearts.

Marjorie Pickthall was not accepted, so instead took work as a secretary and market gardener.

Marjorie Pickthall was 38 years old when, 12 days after surgery, she died of an embolism in Vancouver in 1922.

Marjorie Pickthall is buried beside her mother in St James Cemetery.

Marjorie Pickthall's poetry became, to an extent, a pawn in a literary game between traditionalists and modernists.

Marjorie Pickthall died at thirty-nine: if Yeats had died at the same age, in 1904, we should have had an overwhelming impression of the end of a road to Miltown that we now realize would have been pretty inadequate.

Marjorie Pickthall was, of course, no Yeats, but her Biblical- Oriental pastiches were not so unlike the kind of thing that Ezra Pound was producing at about the same time, and there are many signs of undeveloped possibilities in this book.

Marjorie Pickthall's poems draw upon a body of literary precedents in order to construct a coherent and fantastic defence against unsatisfied desire and what she perceived to be a fundamental incoherence in modern life.

Marjorie Pickthall published over 200 stories and approximately 100 poems, plus numerous articles.

Marjorie Pickthall was published in Atlantic Monthly, The Century Magazine, Harper's, McClure's, Scribner's, plus many other journals and young people's magazines.