Mary herself,
however, became an artist, albeit a literary one. Her first published book in
1873 was Six by Two: Stories of Old
Schoolfellows,” and was co-written with Edith Helen Dixon. Nothing is known
of where or how Mary was educated but she surely must have been, given her
father was a mathematics professor at University College London, and her mother
campaigned for women’s education. Six by
Two, however, is not autobiographical and gives no clues as to her
education. All that can be confirmed is that Mary is not on the records of Bedford College, the first ladies’ college
which her mother helped to found, unlike her sister, Alice, who went there for
three terms 1850 – 1851, possibly to get her out of the way when Mary was born.
Mary is
best known today, if she is known at all, as a writer of fairytales. Mary published
three volumes, On a Pincushion in
1877 (published by Seeley, Jackson & Halliday and illustrated by William De
Morgan), The Necklace of Princess
Fiorimonde in 1880 (published by MacMillan & Co and illustrated by
Walter Crane) and The Wind Fairies in
1900 (published by Seeley and Co. and illustrated by Olive Cockerell). In each
anthology there are fairytales that challenge the prevalent ideologies by
subverting the traditional fairytale conventions and therefore also societal
ones.
One of the
themes that Mary addresses in her fairytales is that of the dangers of
mass-production, a subject very close to the heart of William Morris. Due to
her brother William’s close friendship with Morris, Mary became part of the Arts
and Craft circle, albeit on the outskirts. Mary was a regular visitor to the
Morris household and she often told her stories to Morris himself, the Morris
and Burne-Jones children and to the young Rudyard Kipling. The multi-talented
Mary also apparently cured William Morris of his fear of snakes and she was one
of those who nursed him during his final illness and was at his bedside when he
died in 1896.
Mary’s fairytales
were always marketed as being for children and her critiques on social and
political issues have only recently been recognised. Mary didn’t just write
fairytales, however. She also wrote short stories, some of which were published
in English and American magazines such as The
Ludgate Illustrated, Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, Sylvia’s Home Journal and
The Home-Maker. Other unpublished short
stories - all written on the latest technology, the typewriter - are held in
the De Morgan Archive at Senate House.
Mary also
tried her hand at a two-volume novel called A
Choice of Chance written under the pseudonym of William Dodson, but she
never wrote another one due to poor reviews. Mary also edited her mother’s
reminiscences, Threescore Years and Ten:
Reminiscences of the Late Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan and wrote serious articles
on such diverse subjects as “Co-operation in England in 1889,” “The New
Trades-Unionism and Socialism in England,” “The Jewish Immigrant in East London,”
and “The Education of Englishmen,” published in such journals as The Westminster Review and The Chautauquan.
There is no
evidence of Mary having had any romantic relationships. Whatever the reason, whether
from choice or otherwise, Mary, like many other women at the tail end of the
nineteenth century, remained unmarried, an “Odd Woman,” and because there were
no male members of the family with sufficient funds to keep her, she had to
earn her own keep. It does not seem likely that she made sufficient money from
her writing alone. In 1876, for instance, she received £14 18s 6d (less than
£2,000 in today’s money), being a third of the year’s profit from the sale of
her first volume of fairytales, On a
Pincushion – another third going to the illustrator, her brother William,
and the other third to the publishers, Seeley, Jackson and Halliday. She may
not have earned enough to live on from her writing alone but she also received
dividend payments from stocks she owned. She once told her sister-in-law,
Evelyn (nee Pickering, married to William De Morgan and a well-known painter),
that “I am so thankful I have only a small income – it is so delightful
planning things and deciding what one can afford. It would bore me to death to
be rich!” Ironically, when brother William turned to writing novels in later
life, he made far more money than she ever did from her writing, and indeed
than he had ever done from ceramics.
Mary also
followed in her mother’s footsteps and did her social duty by visiting the poor
families in the East End of London, running a mothers’ club and for a couple of
years she was the secretary of the People’s Concert Society, which brought
classical concerts to the East End. She was also a member of the Women’s
Franchise League and in 1889 she joined other artistic women to sign the
Declaration in Favour of Women’s Suffrage.
By the turn of the nineteenth century Mary was a relatively well-known and respected published writer, albeit not a very well paid one. She does not seem to have written anything after 1900 and at the beginning of the new century she went to live in Egypt, for health reasons, where she became a directress of a girls’ reformatory in Helouan – how this came about has not been established, despite intense research. She died of tuberculosis, what brother William called the “De Morgan curse,” in 1907 at the age of 57 and is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Cairo. Her plot has no stone to mark her last resting place, there having been subsidence many years previously.
Website: https://marilynpemberton.
