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Mary Morison Webster

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Mary Morison Webster
Born26 January 1894
Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K.
Died1980(1980-00-00) (aged 85–86)
OccupationPoet, writer
LanguageEnglish
NationalitySouth African

Mary Morison Webster Schikkerling (26 January 1894[1] – 1980) was a Scottish-born literary critic, novelist and poet who moved to South Africa with her family in 1920.

Biography

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Webster was born and raised in Edinburgh, the daughter of Robert Smith Webster and Eliza Ronald Webster.[2] For most of her adult life she lived in Johannesburg, where she was married to Roland William Schikkerling in 1920; they divorced before 1930.[1][3] She was an influential book reviewer for The Rand Daily Mail and Sunday Times for 40 years.[4] She wrote five novels, including one in collaboration with her sister, novelist Elizabeth Charlotte Webster, who died in 1934,[5] and several collections of poetry. Webster died in 1980, in her eighties.[6][7]

Reception

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Webster's first collection, To-Morrow (1922), was briefly reviewed in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, where the anonymous reviewer found the book "pleasant, easy to read and to enjoy... not tremendous at all, but with many glints of beauty and womanly wisdom."[8] A more recent literary scholar found that "Webster developed a precocious formal and technical competence," but that her focus on personal suffering and despair failed to acknowledge larger structural causes of individual distress.[3] Guy Butler recalled meeting Webster in her later years: "The aging poetess had a somewhat long, sad physiognomy and had dressed her hair with a symbolic wreath of tinsel laurel leaves," he wrote. "The effect was quite startling."[9]

Nuruddin Farah's novel Sweet and Sour Milk (1980) begins with a quote from Mary Morison Webster's poetry as an epigram.[10]

Publications

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Poetry

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Webster's poems appeared in magazines, and were chosen for anthologies including The Bookman Treasury of Living Poets (1928),[11] The Penguin Book of African Verse (1968),[12] and The New Century of South African Poetry (2002).[13][14]

  • "Rencontre" and "World's End" (1920)[15]
  • "The Organ Donkey" (1921)[16]
  • "After Death – Spring 1915" and "Gallipoli" (1922)[17]
  • To-Morrow (1922)[8]
  • "Two Songs in Autumn" (1928)[18]
  • The Silver Flute (1931)
  • Alien Guest (1933)[19]
  • Garland in the Wind (1938)
  • Flowers from Four Gardens (1951)
  • A Litter of Leaves (1971)
  • Rain After Drought

Novels

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  • Evergreen (1929)
  • The Schoolhouse (1933)
  • High Altitude (1949, with Elizabeth Charlotte Webster)
  • The Slave of the Lamp (1950)
  • A Village Scandal (1965)

References

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  1. ^ a b Marriage certificate of Roland William Schikkerling and Mary Morison Webster, dated 18 December 1920, via Ancestry.
  2. ^ The South African Woman's Who's who. Biographies (Pty.) Limited. 1938. p. 413.
  3. ^ a b Lockett, Cecily (1992). "South African Women's Poetry: A Gynocritical Perspective". Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature. 11 (1): 55. doi:10.2307/463781. ISSN 0732-7730.
  4. ^ Gray, Stephen (3 October 2012). Remembering Bosman: Herman Charles Bosman Recollected. Penguin Random House South Africa. ISBN 978-0-14-352711-4.
  5. ^ Webster, Mary Morison (24 April 1949). "Letters to the Editor: For the Record". The New York Times. p. 115. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 11 April 2025.
  6. ^ Leigh, Carol (1986). A Selection of Johannesburg Authors. Johannesburg Public Library. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-620-09824-3.
  7. ^ Smith, Malvern Van Wyk (1990). Grounds of Contest: A Survey of South African English Literature. Jutalit. p. 43. ISBN 978-0-7021-2437-2.
  8. ^ a b "Books in Brief". Poetry: A Magazine of Verse. 22 (6): 345. September 1923.
  9. ^ Butler, Guy (1991). A Local Habitation: An Autobiography, 1945-90. New Africa Books. pp. 170–171. ISBN 978-0-86486-180-1.
  10. ^ Farah, Nuruddin (1980). Sweet and sour milk. African writers series. London ; Exeter, N.H: Heinemann Educational Books. ISBN 978-0-435-90226-1.
  11. ^ Adcock, Arthur St John (1928). The Bookman Treasury of Living Poets. Hodder & Stoughton. pp. 460–461.
  12. ^ Cope, Jack; Krige, Uys (1 January 1968). Penguin Book of South African Verse. Internet Archive. Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-042109-5.
  13. ^ The new century of South African poetry. Internet Archive. Johannesburg : Ad Donkers. 2002. p. 88. ISBN 978-0-86852-224-1.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link) CS1 maint: publisher location (link)
  14. ^ Wylie, Dan (January 2003). "Clutching a handful of granulated glass The new century of South African poetry, Michael Chapman (ed.) : review essay". Scrutiny2. 8 (1): 62–69. doi:10.10520/EJC100985.
  15. ^ Webster, Mary Morison (October 1920). ""Rencontre" and "World's End"". The Chapbook: A Miscellany: 15–21.
  16. ^ Webster, Mary Morison (17 September 1921). "The Organ Donkey". The Living Age (4028): 740.
  17. ^ Webster, Mary Morison (May 1922). ""After Death -- Spring 1915" and "Gallipoli"". The Chapbook: A Miscellany (26): 21, 22.
  18. ^ Webster, Mary Morison (August 1928). "Two Songs in Autumn". The London Mercury. 18 (106): 358.
  19. ^ Webster, Mary Morison; Bookshop, Poetry (1933). Alien guest : poems. The Poetry Bookshop.

See also

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  • Adey, David, et al., comp. (1986). Companion to South African English Literature. Johannesburg: Ad Donker.
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