Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall (14 September 1883, in Gunnersbury, London – 22 April 1922, in Vancouver), was a Canadian writer who was born in England but lived in Canada from the time she was seven. She was once "thought to be the best Canadian poet of her generation."
Life
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.
According to her father, Pickthall had planned her career before she was six; she would be a writer and illustrator of books. Her parents encouraged her artistic talents with lessons in drawing and music; an accomplished violinist, she continued studying the instrument until she was twenty.
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.
Marjorie was educated at the Church of England day school on Beverley Street in Toronto, (possibly St. Mildred's College) and from 1899 at the Bishop Strachan School. She developed her skills at composition and made lasting friendships at these schools, despite 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.
Canadian writing career
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. She sold her first story, "Two-Ears", to the Toronto Globe for $3 in 1898, when she was still a student at Bishop Strachan.
"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.
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'." In that year, she quit school and began to write full-time.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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."