Margery Lawrence

Who was Margery Lawrence?

Margery Lawrence was an English romantic fiction fantasy fiction, horror fiction and detective fiction author who specialized in ghost stories.

She was born Margery Harriet Lawrence, in Wolverhampton. Her father was solicitor Richard J. Lawrence, her mother was called Grace, and she had at least two siblings Allan and Monica. Her father published her early poetry in Songs of Childhood, and Other Verses, in 1913.

Lawrence was also an illustrator, and producing drawings for The Hills of Ruel, and Other Stories by Fiona MacLeod.

Her earliest collections, the Round Table sequence, include Nights of the Round Table and The Terraces of Night. Stefan Dziemianowicz describes these stories as "simple but solidly told tales of horror and the supernatural that are mindful of the classic ghost story tradition but adorned with enough contemporary flourishes" to demonstrate that Lawrence was comfortable working variants on this tradition. These stories often appeared in British pulp magazines such as The Sovereign Magazine and Hutchinson's Mystery-Story prior to book publication.