Mary Morison Webster

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

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

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

Poetry

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

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

References

  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

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