Inez Pearn

Marie Agnes Pearn The author and critic Elizabeth Bowen considered that she belonged to the school of literary realism. Pearn described her childhood in some detail in Marguerite Reilly, her second novel, which was closely based on her family history, spanning four generations since their arrival from Ireland in the mid-1840s, and The First Rebellion, which focuses on an incident during her time as a sixth-former in a Catholic convent boarding school in London.

Pearn spent the summer of 1933 working as a governess to the children of a wealthy family in San Sebastián, Spain. She then won a scholarship to study Spanish Literature at Somerville College, Oxford, where she was close friends with Marghanita Laski and Sally Graves. She was back in San Sebastián the following summer, chaperoned by her cousin, to work as a freelance English teacher. She returned to Madrid in the spring of 1936, this time winning a bursary to pursue research work on her doctoral thesis on Góngora. Her visits to Spain and her romantic involvement, first with a Spanish diplomat and later with an unsuccessful portrait artist, provided the background material for Spanish Portrait, which gives an insightful first hand impression of the confusion and apprehension of the period known in Spanish as the bienio negro, as the Spanish Republic drifted inexorably towards a violent confrontation. The novel was warmly received when it was published in 1945, under the pen name Elizabeth Lake (the name of her maternal grandmother). Elizabeth Bowen, reviewing it in The Tatler, described it as "a remarkable first novel .. a love story, but of an unusual kind - the two characters are in conflict, the love they feel is unwilling, and the love pursues an at once aimless and painful course. ... the outbreak of .. war leaves the fate of one of the characters a mystery." Bowen considered the characterisation of the man "a masterpiece" - he was "indolent, incalculable, conservative", The novel was also reviewed in the New Statesman by the poet Henry Reed.

Marguerite Reilly, Pearn's second novel, also received positive reviews, although one reviewer found it "too long, but must not be missed", and another "very, though not too, long". The heroine was considered "a formidable piece of characterisation", The story focuses on Marguerite, the eldest of a family of working-class Irish Catholics living in the north-east of England, "a dominating, deplorable and heroic character, on a scale that English fiction seldom affords;" Reviewers described the novel as "carefully and imaginatively written", and felt that the author had a "rare gift for keeping a tale going." The Spectator, The Listener (by Henry Reed), and The Bell literary magazine, Dublin. It even made the recommended reading list in The British Journal of Nursing, perhaps because Marguerite trains and works as a nurse, The aunt, however, is "bed-ridden and bad-tempered", "a grotesque and repulsive old drunkard", The heroine, Peggy, was "a robust young person", who "falls foul of a nun and goes back to school one term to find that her enemy has been appointed headmistress." Reviewers compared this novel to Antonia White's Frost in May, with one saying "this new book is certainly in the same class." Reviewers commented on the "magical loveliness of the country" and Philip Toynbee. On Madge's retirement in 1970 they moved to France, restoring an old farm house, where they spent the next five years. Pearn developed cancer in 1975 and died in February 1976, shortly after her 62nd birthday.

Early in 1938 Pearn was captured in a portrait by William Coldstream, a process that involved some 40 sittings. The painting is now held in the archives at the Tate Britain. There is also a series of studies of her by the Bauhaus photographer Lucia Moholy, two of which are held at the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Novels (Pilot Press, 1945) — Republished with an afterword by her daughter, Vicky Randall, by The Clapton Press, 2019, (Pilot Press, 1946) — Republished by The Clapton Press, 2019, The Lovers Disturbed (Cresset Press, 1949) The First Rebellion (Cresset Press, 1951) Siamese Counterpart (Cresset Press, 1958)