Margery Williams - Early Life and Writing Philosophy

Early Life and Writing Philosophy

A native of London, Margery Winifred Williams was born to successful and accomplished parents. The second daughter of a noted barrister and a renowned classical scholar, she, along with her sister, was encouraged by her father, whom she remembered as a deeply loving and caring parent, to read and use her imagination. Writing about her childhood many years later, she recalled how vividly her father described characters from various books and the infinite world of knowledge and adventure that lay on the printed page. She noted that the desire to read, which soon transformed into a need to write, was a legacy from her father that would be hers for a lifetime.

When Margery was seven years old, her father died suddenly, a life-changing event which, in one way or another, would affect all of her future creative activity. The undertone of sadness and the themes of death and loss that flow through her children's books have been criticized by some reviewers, but Williams always maintained that hearts acquire greater humanity through pain and adversity. She wrote that life is a process of constant change—there are departures for some and arrivals for others—and the process allows us to grow and persevere.

Margery moved with her family to the United States in 1890. After a year in New York, they decided to live in a rural Pennsylvania farming community. Over the succeeding years, until 1898, Margery was a student at the Convent School in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania. Her ambition to make a living as an author propelled her in 1901, at the age of nineteen, to return to her birthplace and submit to a London publisher her first children's stories. A number of these saw print, as did her first novel The Late Returning, which was published in 1902 and aimed at an adult audience. It did not sell well and neither did her subsequent novels.