Greville Texidor

Margaret Greville Foster (1902 — 20 August 1964), best known by her pen name Greville Texidor, was an English fiction writer, notable for her work written while living in New Zealand from 1940 to 1948.

After traveling the world as a performer and fighting alongside her husband for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, Texidor went into exile in New Zealand with her family during the early years of World War II, pushed out of England due to her husband's German background and the couple's radical politics.

In New Zealand, she began writing fiction and joined Auckland's literary community. Her short stories and novellas, compiled posthumously in the collection In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot: Selected Fiction, are considered an important contribution to the existentialist period in New Zealand's literary canon.

Early life Greville Texidor was born Margaret Greville Foster in 1902 in Wolverhampton, England.

After her father, William Arthur Foster, took his own life in 1919 amid a legal scandal, Margaret dropped out of school and moved to London to join the art world in Hampstead. She was joined by her mother, Editha Greville Prideaux Foster, and sister, Kate, who were both painters.

London life and world travel In London, she began to work as a model and actress. She then toured Europe and the Americas as a chorus girl, picking up a contortionist boyfriend along the way.

Her frequent travels brought her into contact with a variety of interesting men, and she was married three times: to a Brit, a Spaniard, and a German. While in Tossa de Mar, Greville had an affair with a teacher, the German Werner Otto Droescher. Greville asked Manuel Texidor for a divorce and later married Werner, while keeping the Texidor surname. Greville and Werner fought on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.

Both in Spain and back in England, Texidor and her husband worked to help resettle Spanish and German refugees.

Writing Once in New Zealand, Texidor began writing fiction for the first time in her life. Her 1942 story "Home Front" was her first work to be published in New Zealand; it has gone on to be widely anthologized.

Her first book, the novella These Dark Glasses, was written during her time in New Zealand but published in 1949, after she left the country. These Dark Glasses deals with a communist writer who had been helping the Republicans in Spain, as she grows disillusioned with the intellectual scene of Southern France.

In her work, Texidor brought a critical, cosmopolitan eye to New Zealand's society of the period, which she found provincial.