Leonard Merrick

Leonard Merrick (21 February 1864 – 7 August 1939) was an English novelist. Although largely forgotten today, he was widely admired by his peers, J. M. Barrie called Merrick the "novelist's novelist."

He was born as Leonard Miller in Belsize Park, London of Jewish parentage. After schooling at Brighton College, he studied to be a solicitor in Brighton and studied law at Heidelberg, but he was forced to travel to South Africa at the age of eighteen after his father suffered a serious financial loss. There he worked as an overseer in the Kimberley diamond mine and in a solicitors office. After surviving a near-fatal case of "camp fever," he returned to London in the late 1880s and worked as an actor and actor-manager under the stage name of Leonard Merrick. He legally changed his name to Leonard Merrick in 1892. He later worked his experiences in South Africa and in the theatre into numerous works of fiction. Merrick's novels include Mr Bazalgette's Agent (1888), a detective story; Violet Moses (1891), about a Jewish financier and his troubled wife; The Worldlings (1900), a psychological investigation of a crime; Conrad in Quest of His Youth (1903), the tale of a disillusioned man who, at thirty- seven, sets out to pick up the romantic threads of his younger life, it is "judged his most successful work" according to John Sutherland. George Orwell thought that this is because it is one of the few of his books which is not set against a background of poverty.

Merrick was well regarded by other writers of his era. In 1918 fifteen writers, including famous authors such as H. G. Wells, J. M. Barrie, G. K. Chesterton and William Dean Howells, collaborated with publisher E. P. Dutton to issue "The Works of Leonard Merrick" in fifteen volumes, which were published between 1918 and 1922. Each volume in the series was selected and prefaced by one of the writers. In 2009 a biography was issued titled Leonard Merrick: A Forgotten Novelist's Novelist by William Baker and Jeannettes Robert Shumaker. The title is taken in part from a quote by J. M. Barrie who called Merrick a "novelist's novelist." William Dean Howells wrote of Merrick "I can think of no recent fictionist of his nation who can quite match with Mr. Merrick in that excellence [of "shapeliness" or form in the novel]. This will seem great praise, possibly too great, to the few who have a sense of such excellence; but it will probably be without real meaning to most, though our public might well enjoy form if it could once be made to imagine it."

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