Marguerite Steen

Marguerite Steen (born May 12, 1894 in Liverpool ; died August 4, 1975 in Blewbury ) was an English writer . She mainly wrote fiction and historical novels, but also plays and biographies.

Life

She was born to Captain George Connolly Benson and his wife Margaret Jones. She was adopted and raised by Joseph and Margaret Jane Steen. After graduating from school in 1915, she was a teacher at a private school for three years before trying unsuccessfully to pursue a career as a theater actress and then to earn money as a dance teacher. Her engagements, later three years as a touring actress, allowed her to travel extensively in Europe and North America. On the advice of Ellen Terry to process her experiences in novel form, she published her first novel about the theater, The Gilt Cage , in 1927 .

Her literary breakthrough came in 1934 with Matador . Her main work is the first volume of her trilogy on slave trade, colonialism and the early industrial age, which she wrote in 1941: The Sun is My Undoing . This work, rated by contemporary critics as being equivalent to Gone With the Wind , was followed by the less popular sequels Twilight on the Floods and Phoenix Rising . She was considered one of the most famous English authors in Germany in the 1960s. She wrote her autobiographies in the late 1960s.

From 1935 she lived privately with the painter William Nicholson , unmarried . When their shared apartment in London was destroyed during the Second World War , the couple moved to Blewbury, Berkshire , where Steen died in 1975.

Works (selection)

The following lists the works for which a translation is available:

• The Gilt Cage , 1926 (first work)
• Stallion , 1933 (German: Der Hengst , 1955)
• Matador , 1934 (German: On in the fight , 1935)
• The Sun is My Undoing , 1941
  • (German: The Black Sun , 1942, novel)
  • (German: The slave trader from Bristol , 1978, part 1)
  • (German: The girl from Cuba , 1978, part 2)
• Rose Timson , 1946 (German: Rose Timson , 1947)
• Twilight on the Floods , 1949 (German: Gold Coast in Twilight , 1950)
• The Swan , 1951 (German: Der Schwan , 1952)
• Phoenix Rising , 1952 (German: Phoenix from the flame , 1953)
• Bulls of Parral , 1954 (German: Stiere von Parral , 1956)
• Little White King , 1956 (German: Kleiner Weisser König , 1957)
• The Woman in the Back Seat , 1959 (German: The woman in the back seat , 1960)
• The Tower , 1959 (German: Der Turm , 1962)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Antonius Lux (ed.): Great women of world history. A thousand biographies in words and pictures . Sebastian Lux Verlag , Munich 1963, p. 446.