Margery Williams

Margery Williams Bianco was an English-American author, primarily of popular children's books. A professional writer since the age of nineteen, she achieved lasting fame at forty-one with the 1922 publication of the classic that is her best-known work, The Velveteen Rabbit (1922). She received the Newbery Honor for Winterbound.

Margery Winifred Williams was born in London, the second daughter of a noted barrister and a renowned classical scholar, Robert Williams and Florence Williams née Harper. When Margery was seven years old, her father died suddenly, a life-changing event which, in one way or another, would affect all of her future creative activity.

In 1890 Margery moved with her family to the United States. A year later they moved to a rural Pennsylvania farming community. Over the succeeding years, until 1898, Margery was a student at the Convent School in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania. Her ambition to make a living as an author propelled her in 1901, at the age of nineteen, to return to her birthplace and submit to a London publisher her first novel, The Late Returning, which was published in 1902 and aimed at an adult audience. It did not sell well and neither did her subsequent novels, The Price of Youth, and The Bar.

While visiting her publisher, Margery Williams met Francesco Bianco, an Italian living in London, who was employed as the manager of one of the book departments. They were married in 1904 and became the parents of a son, Cecco and a daughter, Pamela. Pamela was a renowned child artist who had a showing in Turin at the age of eleven. Her fame brought the Bianco family to New York and (with the exception of Cecco) they lived in the Greenwich Village area until the end of their lives. Pamela illustrated some of her mother's books, including The Skin Horse and The Little Wooden Doll. When her children were young, Margery considered motherhood a full-time job, and her writing efforts were curtailed

In 1914, Williams wrote a horror novel, The Thing in the Woods, about a werewolf in the Pennsylvania region. It was later republished in the US in a slightly revised version under the pseudonym Harper Williams. The Thing in the Woods was known to H. P. Lovecraft, and some commentators think it may have influenced his "The Dunwich Horror". He also wrote a poem entitled "On The Thing in the Woods by Harper Williams."

At the end of 1918 the Great War had ended, but postwar hunger and deprivation became a problem in Europe. In 1921, Bianco, along with her family, returned to the United States and settled in Greenwich Village. Inspired by the innocence and playful imagination of her children, as well as the inspiration she felt from the magic and mysticism contained in the works of Walter de la Mare, she decided to resume her writing, and gained almost immediate celebrity.

The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real was Margery Williams Bianco's first American work, and it remains her most famous. It has remained a classic piece of literature through numerous adaptations in children's theatre as well as on radio, television and in the movies.

In her final nine years, Bianco interspersed children's books with novels for young adults. These all featured young people who were in one way or another isolated or alienated from mainstream society and the joy, success, prosperity and social acceptance seemingly enjoyed by their peers. One of those books, Winterbound, about two girls, still in their teenage years, who are called upon to assume adult responsibilities in caring for their young siblings, when the parents have to go away suddenly, was a runner-up for the 1937 Newbery Medal showcasing excellence in youth literature. In 1971, upon the establishment of the Newbery Honor, the work was retroactively distinguished with that prestigious citation.

In 1939, as her native Britain entered World War II, Bianco began to include patriotic themes and references to European history in her works, such as 1941's Franzi and Gizi. Her final book, 1944's Forward Commandos!, was an inspirational story of wartime heroism, which included as one of its characters a black soldier. Acknowledging the contribution of African-Americans to the war effort was extremely rare in literary output of the time and that fact was noted in the book's reviews.

Margery Williams Bianco did not live to see World War II end. As Forward Commandos! went on sale, she became ill and, after three days in hospital, died at the age of 63.