L. Adams Beck

Lily Adams Beck, née Elizabeth Louisa Moresby (1862 in Queenstown, Cork, Ireland – 3 January 1931 in Kyoto, Japan) was a British writer of short stories, novels, biographies and esoteric books, under the names of L. Adams Beck, E. Barrington and Louis Moresby, Lily Adams Beck (Elizabeth Louisa Moresby) c1926. This image is in the public domain.

Biography

Elizabeth Louisa "Lily" Moresby was born in 1862 in Queenstown, Cork, Ireland, UK. (While there is a degree of uncertainty about her birth and early life, some sources suggest that Moresby was born in Queenstown, Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom.)

She was the second child of an Irish mother, Jane Willis (Scott), and an English father, John Moresby. Her father, a Royal Navy captain, explored the coast of New Guinea and was the first European to visit the site of Port Moresby. She was also the granddaughter of Fairfax Moresby, who culminated a long naval career as Admiral of the Fleet. She had an elder brother, Walter Halliday (9 November 1861 – 24 April 1951), and four younger sisters: Ethel Fortescue (1865 – ?), Georgina (23 July 1867 – ?), Hilda Fairfax (16 December 1868 – 16 August 1893) and Gladys Moresby (5 April 1870 – ?).

She first married Edward Western Hodgkinson, a commander in the Royal Navy. They lived and traveled widely in the East, including Egypt, India, China, Tibet, and Japan. She was 60 years old by the time she started publishing her novels, which commonly had an Asian setting. Her stories collected in The Openers of the Gate (1930) feature an occult detective inspired by the "John Silence" stories of Algernon Blackwood. Glorious Apollo (1925), a fictionalized biography of Lord Byron, was a bestseller during the 1920s. The Thunderer is a historical novel revolving around the relationship between Napoleon and Joséphine.

She continued to write and travel until her death on 3 January 1931 in Kyoto, Japan.