Oliver Onions
| George Oliver Onions | |
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Oliver Onions' Portrait
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| Born | George Oliver Onions 13 November 1873 Bradford, Yorkshire, England |
| Died | 9 April 1961 (aged 87) Aberystwyth, Wales |
| Pen name | Oliver Onions |
| Occupation | Novelist |
| Language | English |
| Nationality | British |
| Genre | Detective fiction, Ghost stories, Romance, historical fiction |
| Spouse | Berta Ruck (1909–1961) |
| Children | 2 |
George Oliver Onions (13 November 1873 – 9 April 1961) was a British writer of story collections and over 40 novels. He wrote in a variety of genres, but is perhaps beset remembered for his ghost stories, notably the highly-regard collection Widdershins and the widely anthologized novella "The Beckoning Fair One". He was married to the novelist Berta Ruck.
Born George Oliver Onions on 13 November 1873 in Bradford, Yorkshire, England, UK, of humble parents. He studied art for three years in London at the National Arts Training Schools (now the Royal College of Art). In the book Twentieth Century Authors, Onions described his interests as and science; he was also an amateur boxer as a young man.
In 1909, he married the writer Berta Ruck (1878–1978), and they had two sons, Arthur (b. 1912) and William (b. 1913). In 1918, he legally changed his name to George Oliver, but continued to publish under the name Oliver Onions.
He died on 9 April 1961 in Aberystwyth, Wales.
Originally trained as a commercial artist, he worked as a designer of posters and books, and as a magazine illustrator during the Boer War. Encouraged by the American writer Gelett Burgess, Onions began writing fiction. The first editions of his novels were published with dust jackets bearing full-colour illustrations painted by Onions himself.
Poor Man's Tapestry (1946) and its prequel, Arras of Youth (1949) are about the adventures of a juggler, Robert Gandelyn, in the fourteenth century. Onions wrote two detective novels: A Case in Camera and In Accordance with the Evidence. Two of his works are science fiction novels: New Moon (1918) about a utopian Britain, and The Tower of Oblivion (1921), featuring a middle-aged man who recedes back to his youth.A Certain Man (1931), about a magical suit of clothes, and A Shilling to Spend (1965), about a self-perpetuating coin, are fantasy novels.
Onions wrote several collections of ghost stories, of which the best known is Widdershins (1911). It includes the novella The Beckoning Fair One, widely regarded as one of the best in the genre of horror fiction, especially psychological horror. On the surface, this is a conventional haunted house story: an unsuccessful writer moves into rooms in an otherwise empty house, in the hope that isolation will help his failing creativity. His sensitivity and imagination are enhanced by his seclusion, but his art, his only friend and his sanity are all destroyed in the process. The story can be read as narrating the gradual possession of the protagonist by a mysterious and possessive feminine spirit, or as a realistic description of a psychotic outbreak culminating in catatonia and murder, told from the psychotic subject's point of view. The precise description of the slow disintegration of the protagonist's mind is terrifying in either case.
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