Марджори Боуэн: Жизнь и творчество британской писательницы

British writer (1885–1952)

Margaret Gabrielle Vere Long (née Campbell; 1 November 1885 – 23 December 1952), who used the pseudonyms Marjorie Bowen, George R. Preedy, Joseph Shearing, Robert Paye, John Winch, and Margaret Campbell or Mrs. Vere Campbell, was a British author who wrote historical romances and supernatural horror stories, as well as works of popular history and biography.

Bowen was born in 1885 on Hayling Island in Hampshire. Her alcoholic father Vere Douglas Campbell left the family when Bowen was young and was eventually found dead on a London street. She and her sister grew up in poverty, and their mother was reportedly unaffectionate. Bowen studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and later in Paris. In an interview for Twentieth Century Authors, she listed her hobbies as "painting, needlework and reading".

Bowen wrote more than 150 books, with the majority being published under the pseudonym "Marjorie Bowen". She also wrote under the names Joseph Shearing, George R. Preedy, John Winch, Robert Paye and Margaret Campbell. After publishing The Viper of Milan (1906), she produced a steady stream of writings until her death. Under her own name, Bowen primarily published historical novels, including a trilogy about King William III: I Will Maintain (1910), Defender of the Faith (1911), and God and the King (1911). Her 1909 novel Black Magic is a Gothic horror novel about a medieval witch. Bowen also wrote non fiction history books aimed at a popular readership. The Shearing novels were especially popular in the United States, with Moss Rose, The Golden Violet and Forget Me Not achieving both critical and commercial success, being championed by reviewers such as Phil Stong. Until the late 1940s, the identity of Shearing was not known to the general public, and some speculated it was the pseudonym of F. Tennyson Jesse. Her last, posthumous, novel was The Man with the Scales (1954), about a man obsessed with revenge, and contains supernatural elements reminiscent of the works of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Many of these stories were published as Berkley Medallion Books. Several of her books were adapted as films. Bowen's supernatural short fiction was gathered in three collections: The Last Bouquet (1933), The Bishop of Hell (1949) (featuring an introduction by Michael Sadleir) and the posthumous Kecksies, edited for Arkham House in the late 1940s, but not published until 1976.

Bowen's books are much sought after by aficionados of gothic horror and received praise from critics. Graham Greene stated in his Paris Review interview (Autumn 1953), "I chose Marjorie Bowen [as a major influence] because as I have told you, I don't think that the books that one reads as an adult influence one as a writer But books such as Marjorie Bowen's, read at a young age, do influence one considerably." Horror reviewer Robert Hadji described Bowen as "one of the great supernatural writers of this century". Jessica Amanda Salmonson, discussing The Last Bouquet, described Bowen's prose as "stylish and moody, dramatic to the highest degree" and stated "what in other hands is merely tacky or gross is, from Marjorie Bowen, a superior art, chilling and seductive". Sally Benson in The New Yorker, discussing the "Joseph Shearing" books, wrote, "Mr Shearing is a painstaking researcher, a superb writer, a careful technician, and a master of horror. There is no one else quite like him". Sheldon Jaffery stated that Bowen's "weird fiction ranks favorably with such distaff portrayers of the supernatural as Mary Wilkins Freeman, Edith Wharton and Lady Cynthia Asquith." By contrast, Colin Wilson criticized Bowen as a writer of "bad adventure stories" in a review of A Sort of Life by Graham Greene.