Marjorie Pickthall

Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall (14 September 1883, in Gunnersbury, London – 22 April 1922, in Vancouver) was a Canadian writer who was born in England but lived in Canada from the time she was seven. She was once "thought to be the best Canadian poet of her generation."

Life Marjorie Pickthall was born in 1883 in the west London district of Gunnersbury, to Arthur Christie Pickthall, a surveyor and the son of a Church of England clergyman, and Elizabeth Helen Mary Pickthall (née Mallard), daughter of an officer in the Royal Navy, part Irish and part Huguenot.

According to her father, Pickthall had planned her career before she was six; she would be a writer and illustrator of books. ) and from 1899 at the Bishop Strachan School. She developed her skills at composition and made lasting friendships at these schools, despite poor health and suffering from headaches, dental, eye and back problems. Summers were spent walking and studying nature on the Toronto islands. As well, she read poetry: her favourite English poets were Fiona Macleod, William Morris, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She sold her first story, "Two-Ears", to the Toronto Globe for $3 in 1898, when she was still a student at Bishop Strachan.

"Two-Ears" (along with one of Pickthall's poems) would go on the next year to win The Mail and Empire'''s writing competition. By the age of 17 she was writing for both the Mail and Empire and the Globe, contributing to their "Young People's Corner" and "Circle of Young Canada" pages.

Move to England In England, Pickthall first stayed with her uncle, Dr. Frank Reginald Mallard, in Hammersmith and then began renting Chalke Cottage in Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, with her second cousin Edith Emma Whillier. Successive summers were spent at Chalke Cottage. She began writing again and in 1914 wrote the historical novel Poursuite Joyeuse, which was published in 1915 as Little Hearts. The book was a failure; "it earned no more than £15. Nor, despite favourable reviews, did it facilitate Pickthall's entry into the London literary world, which she felt was closed to her as a colonial.... Moreover, she was out of touch with the American market."

Writing

Marjorie Pickthall "stood as proof in the eyes of the next generation of female poets that women could indeed earn the respect and attention of a literary establishment dominated by men." Garvin quoted from the book review in Saturday Night magazine:

"The Drift of Pinions is exquisitely lyrical, with a flawless rhythm and melody.... This poet pays no heed to the headlines of to-day ... but goes her way in the world of iris-buds and golden fern, hearing and seeing only the things that are most excellent.... It is impossible in comment or quotation to give an idea of the subtle beauty of execution, the ideal spirituality of conception, which make such poems as 'The Lamp of Poor Souls' and 'A Mother in Egypt' poetic achievements of the rarest kind.... The singer's gifts are splendour and tenderness of colour, sweetness of silvery phrase, and a true poet's unwavering belief in 'the subtle thing called spirit.

At Pickthall's death, Pelham Edgar wrote: "Her talent was strong and pure and tender, and her feeling for beauty was not more remarkable than her unrivalled gift for expressing it." Archibald MacMechan called her "the truest, sweetest singing voice ever praised in Canada." In his 1925 biography, Marjorie Pickthall: A Book of Remembrance, Lorne Pierce could point to ten poetic tributes from top Canadian poets. Pierce himself praised her "Colour, Cadence, Contour, Craftsmanship."

Yet, as Donald A. Precosky writes in Pickthall's Poetry Foundation biography of today: "Probably no other Canadian writer has suffered such a plunge in reputation as Marjorie Pickthall.... Now her work, except for two or three anthologized pieces, goes unread.".

For Pierce, Pickthall had already begun to repeat herself by the time of her first book: "'Bega,' 'The Little Sister of the Prophet,' and 'The Bridgegroom of Cana,' all published in 1909... [show] the full maturity of her powers. When Drift of Pinions ... appeared in 1913, she had already written much of her best poetry, and was to continue not only the repetition of her favourite attitudes and metaphors, but even the vocabulary that included such words as gray, little, silver, rose, dreams, mist, dove, and moth."

The comparisons to Yeats and Pound are apt. Like Pound and his mentor Eliot, Pickthall crammed her verses with literary allusions; but while this made Pound and Eliot cutting-edge to some, all it got her was the epithet, "Pickthall the Obscure."

Kizuk's interpretation is interesting: "Pickthall's verse achieves that quality of poetic autonomy that Roman Jakobson called 'literariness.' Her verse might best be introduced as an intense apostrophe to literary beauty: a turning away from the trial to address the judges in impassioned language that an audience may only overhear. Her poems draw upon a body of literary precedents in order to construct a coherent and fantastic defence against unsatisfied desire and what she perceived to be a fundamental incoherence in modern life."

In The Bridge,'' Pickthall "attempted a sharper psychological characterization and a realistic style culled from reading Balzac." Many have expressed their surprise on reading the play. Frye, for instance, wrote: "I expected to find it Celtic twilight with a lot of early Yeats in it. It turned out to be a violent, almost brutal melodrama with a lot of Browning in it."