Queer Places:
Pinehurst Island, 1000 Islands, near Gananoque, ON K7G 2M2, Canada
Bowerchalke, Salisbury SP5 5BE, UK
Saint James Cemetery
Toronto, Toronto Municipality, Ontario, Canada
Marjorie
Lowry Christie Pickthall (14 September 1883,
Gunnersbury, London – 22 April 1922,
Vancouver), was a Canadian writer who was born in England but lived in
Canada from the time she was seven.[1]
She was once "thought to be the best
Canadian poet of her generation."[2]
In a 1911 letter, Ethelwyn Wetherald explains the sleeping arrangements at Pinehurst Island
(one of the Thousand Islands near Kingston, Ontario, became a gathering retreat for women writers):
I had the most charming little front bedroom, with a wide open door giving on a balcony overlooking the river. On one side of me was H.C.’s room and on the other Marjorie Pickthall’s, and as the partitions were thin varnished boards reaching about halfway up, we three had most delightful talks in the early morning and while dressing. M.P. is lovely in soul and body–pure undiluted genius. She is very dear to me and I can never be grateful enough for this opportunity of knowing her.
Wetherald’s description of Marjorie Pickthall suggests the respect and admiration she felt toward her. The link between Pickthall and
Helena Coleman is explained by Alex Kizuk: “At the University of Toronto, Pickthall attracted the friendship and encouragement of the older poet Helena Coleman”. In a separate article, Pickthall is described as an “intimate friend” of
Helen Coleman, niece of Helena Coleman.
The use of the term “intimate friend” by early Canadian critics appears to
have been their coded way of intimating loving relationships between women.
Wetherald herself has been suggested was in an intimate friendship with
Helena Coleman.
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 (née Mallard),
daughter of an officer in the Royal
Navy, part Irish and part
Huguenot.[3]
According to her father, Pickthall had planned her career before she was
six; she would be a writer and illustrator of books.[4]
Her parents encouraged her artistic talents with lessons in drawing and music;
an accomplished violinist, she continued studying the instrument until she was
twenty.[1]
By 1890, Pickthall and her family had moved to
Toronto,
Ontario, Canada where her father initially worked at the city's waterworks
before becoming an electrical draftsman. Her only brother died in 1894.[1]
Marjorie was educated at the
Church of England day school on Beverley Street in Toronto, (possibly
St. Mildred's College[5])
and from 1899 at the
Bishop Strachan School. She developed her skills at composition and made
lasting friendships at these schools, despite su poor health and suffering
from headaches, dental, eye and back problems. Summers were spent walking and
studying nature on the Toronto islands. As well, she read poetry: her
favourite English poets were
Fiona Macleod,
William Morris, and
Dante Gabriel Rossetti.[1]
According to
The Canadian Encyclopedia From an early age [Pickthall] contributed
stories to the magazines and newspapers; and before her first book appeared,
her genius was recognized.[6]
She sold her first story, "Two-Ears", to the
Toronto Globe for $3 in 1898, when she was still a student at Bishop
Strachan.[7]
"Two-Ears" (along with one of Pickthall's poems) would go on the next year
to win
The Mail and Empire's writing competition. By the age of 17 she was
writing for both the Mail and Empire and the Globe, contributing
to their "Young People's Corner" and "Circle of Young Canada" pages.[1]
Pickthall won the Mail and Empire contest again in 1900, this time
for her poem "O Keep the World For Ever At the Dawn." "With its Canadian
inflection of the dream landscapes of late-19th-century
aestheticism and its impassioned language and musicality," says the
Dictionary of Canadian Biography, "it attracted the attention of
professors whose critical support would ensure Pickthall's lasting
reputation." To those academics, Pickthall's "rejection of
modernism
... and
futurism's abrasive forms represented continuity with the
idealism
of the 'Confederation
Poets'."[1]
In that year, she quit school and began to write full-time.[4]
In July 1903 Pickthall's short story The Greater Gift was featured
in the first edition of East and West (Toronto), a church magazine for
young people. She became a regular contributor. Three serials she wrote for
the magazine – Dick's Desertion: A Boy’s Adventures in Canadian Forests
(1905), The Straight Road (1906), and Billy’s Hero, or, The Valley
of Gold (1908) – were published as
juvenile novels, illustrated by
Charles William Jefferys.[1]
In 1904 her poem "The Homecomers" won third prize in a poetry contest and
caught the attention of
Pelham Edgar, professor of English at the
University of Toronto's
Victoria College. He began publishing her work regularly in the college
magazine,
Acta Victoriana. He also introduced her to Sir
Andrew Macphail, editor of the prestigious University Magazine, who
also began regularly printing her poetry from 1907 on.[1]
In 1905 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. "Pickthall wrote more fiction during her very productive
decade after 1905. Her poetry might be highly praised, but it paid little,
while stories fetched as much as $150."[1]
Pickthall was devastated by her mother's death in February 1910. With the
help of poet
Helena Coleman, she got a job at the Victoria College library to make ends
meet. However, back problems (and possibly a nervous breakdown) caused her to
take a leave of absence in spring 1912. Later that year, determined to see
some of the world, Pickthall went to England.[1]
In her absence from Canada, Macphail's University Magazine published
Pickthall's first collection of poetry, The Drift of Pinions, "in an
edition of 1,000 boxed copies that sold out in ten days in November, 1913."[8]
In England, 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.
Successive summers were spent at Chalke Cottage. She began writing
again and in 1914 wrote the historical novel Poursuite Joyeuse, which
was published in 1915 as Little Hearts. The book was a failure; "it
earned no more than £15. Nor, despite favourable reviews, did it facilitate
Pickthall's entry into the London literary world, which she felt was closed to
her as a colonial.... Moreover, she was out of touch with the American
market."[1]
In 1916 she published The Lamp of Poor Souls, an expanded volume of
poetry.[1]
During 1915 and 1916 Pickthall trained in automobile mechanics to do her
part in the
war
effort. She was not accepted, so instead took work as a secretary and
market gardener. This experience formed the basis of an essay, Women On the
Land In England, which was subsequently published in East and West.
It also led to an unsuccessful commercial venture in 1917, growing vegetables
at Chalke Cottage with a woman known as Long-John.[1]
In May 1918 health problems forced her to quit as assistant librarian in
the South Kensington Meteorological Office, so she returned to Bowerchalke and
completed 20 stories by the end of the year, "half of which were sold by
January. Another creative burst between September and December 1919 produced a
novel (The Bridge: A Story of the
Great
Lakes), a verse drama (The Wood Carver's Wife), and 16
stories."[1]
On 22 May 1920 she sailed from
Liverpool
for Toronto, and then journeyed on to
Lang Bay in the Sunshine Coast area of
British Columbia with
Edith Joan Lyttleton; then on to the
Boundary Bay summer camp of
Isabel Ecclestone Mackay where she revised The Bridge. She then
began a new novel, The Beaten Man: "She struggled over this novel in
Victoria in the winter of 1920–21 ... and rejected five drafts."[1]
'The Wood Carver's Wife', published in the University Magazine in
April 1920, "was staged at the New Empire Theatre in Montreal in March 1921
and later at Hart House Theatre in Toronto." Audiences and reviewers responded
enthusiastically.[1]
In 1921 Pickthall settled in the
Clo-oose community of the
Ditidaht people on the west coast of
Vancouver Island (a community immortalized in her poem, "The
Sailor's Grave at Clo-oose, V.I."). Soon, though, her health failed and
she was admitted to a
nursing home in
Victoria, British Columbia.[1]
Pickthall was 38 years old when, 12 days after surgery, she died of an
embolism
in Vancouver in 1922. She is buried beside her mother in
St. James Cemetery. Although her father was her executor her estate was
bequeathed to her aunt, Laura Mallard, in whose home she had done most of her
writing.[1][9]
A collection of her poems and a volume of her collected
short
stories were both published
posthumously.
Her father compiled and published her Collected Poems in 1925 and
again, definitively, in 1936.[10]
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marjorie_Pickthall
- http://canadianpoetry.org/volumes/vol57/chambers.html