Marguerite Steen

Marguerite Steen
Born	12 May 1894 Liverpool, England
Died	4 August 1975 (aged 81)
Occupation	Writer
Genre	Fiction, biography, drama
Notable works	The Sun is My Undoing

Marguerite Steen (12 May 1894 – 4 August 1975) was a British writer, most popular in the 1930s and 1940s.

Daughter of Capt. George Connolly Benson (King's Shropshire Light Infantry) (killed in action in Ashanti in 1900) and Margaret Jones, Marguerite was adopted by Joseph and Margaret Jane Steen. Educated at a private school and subsequently, with much more success, at Kendal High School, at 19 she became a teacher in a private school. After three years she abandoned that career and went to London to fulfill her ambition of working in the theatre. Failing to gain entry to the theatrical world, she accepted instead an offer to teach dance in Yorkshire schools. This earned her a comfortable living (rising to over £500 a year) which enabled her to spend long periods travelling in France and Spain—the latter becoming her adopted homeland. In 1921, she managed to join the Fred Terry / Julia Neilson drama company, at £3 per week, and spent three years touring with them. She was befriended by Ellen Terry, and when she found herself unemployed in 1926, took her advice and wrote a novel (not her first, strictly speaking, as she had made an attempt at the age of 8). This work, The Gilt Cage, was published in 1927, and was followed by some 40 more books.

Very much at home among creative people, she wrote biographies of the Terrys, of her friend Hugh Walpole, of the 18th century poet and actress (and sometime mistress to the Prince of Wales) Mary 'Perdita' Robinson, and of her own lover, the artist Sir William Nicholson. According to Steen's account in Looking Glass, they met in Andalucia in May 1935, and by mid-June were living together at Nicholson's mews studio in Apple Tree Yard, off Jermyn Street. Nicholson had been separated from his second wife Edith Stuart-Wortley for some years, but they remained on good terms; although Edie promised to give him a divorce, she never did so. Marguerite had a fair artistic talent herself, and in the 1930s she also wrote a couple of plays, but her forte was the historical novel.

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