Trekkie Parsons

Trekkie Ritchie Parsons ( Marjorie Tulip Ritchie; 15 June 1902 – 24 July 1995) was an English artist and lithographer, perhaps best known as the (perhaps chaste) lover of Leonard Woolf after his wife Virginia's death.

Background Trekkie Ritchie Parsons was born Marjorie Tulip Ritchie, in 1902 in Durban, Colony of Natal. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London.

Her parents, Allan McGregor Ritchie (b. 1870, Edinburgh) and Sarah Maria Tulip (b. 1867, Stockton on Tees) married in Cumberland in 1894. When her sister Alice Ritchie (an author of children's books that Trekkie illustrated) was born in 1898, the family had moved to Durban where Allan was a practising architect until about 1914 when he enlisted for war service. In 1926, she married Peter (Percy Alfred) Brooker, a fellow student at the Slade School. The marriage was short-lived, and in 1934 she married Ian Parsons, an editor at Chatto & Windus. Two months after Virginia Woolf's death in 1941, Leonard visited Alice, who was dying of cancer, at Trekkie's house. During Trekkie and Leonard's relationship, Trekkie's husband Ian established a long liaison with his Chatto & Windus colleague Norah Smallwood, whom Trekkie despised.

Trekkie died in 1995, at age 93, in Lewes, England.