Margerie Bonner

Margerie Bonner (February 17, 1905 – September 28, 1988) was an American actress, scriptwriter, and novelist. She is best known as the wife of Malcolm Lowry and for her support of the author while he wrote his best known novel, Under the Volcano, considered one of the finest novels of the 20th century.

Biography Acting career The younger sister of silent screen star Priscilla Bonner, She made her film debut in Reno (1923) and over the next five years she appeared as a leading lady or support in over a dozen films (often spelling her first name Marjorie). They married in 1940 and settled in a beach shack in Dollarton, a small town near Vancouver, British Columbia.

Bonner wrote scripts for CBC Radio and worked with Lowry on a screenplay for the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel Tender Is the Night. She wrote three novels during the 1940s. Two were mystery novels, The Shapes That Creep (1944) and The Last Twist of the Knife (1946) (both "in the vein of Agatha Christie"); a third was "a more ambitious novel about human passions, dreams, and failure", Horse in the Sky (1947). A fourth novel, The Castle of Malatesta, was a psychological novel that remained in manuscript. Since Lowry had a tendency toward verbosity, her most frequent editorial comment was "cut". She is widely “considered to be the model for its central female character, the consul's wife, Yvonne."

Lowry's death In 1955 Lowry was persuaded by her to return to Ripe, a small village in Sussex, England, where he died two years later "after a fatal mixture of gin and sodium amytol: the coroner's verdict was 'Death by misadventure.'"

"Foul play at White Cottage", an article by biographer Gordon Bowker published in the Times Literary Supplement on 20 February 2004, outlined inconsistencies in the various different accounts of Lowry's death offered by Margerie.

A 2007 collection of texts by Lowry suggests "he either committed suicide or was in fact murdered by his wife."

Later life After Lowry's death in 1957, Margerie Bonner returned to Los Angeles and co-edited with Douglas Day the unfinished novel Dark as the Grave Wherein My Friend Is Laid in 1968, and edited his Psalms and Songs in 1975. The Last Twist of the Knife, Scribners, 1946 Horse in the Sky, Scribners, 1947