Rosalind Murray

Rosalind Murray (1890–1967) was a British-born writer and novelist known for The Happy Tree and The Leading Note.

Murray's parents were the classical scholar Gilbert Murray OM (1866-1957) and Lady Mary Henrietta Howard (1865–1956), daughter of George Howard, 9th Earl of Carlisle. She was one of five children, and had three brothers, Basil Murray, Denis and Stephen, and one sister, Agnes Elizabeth.[1]

During her childhood, Rosalind spent time abroad in Italy for the purposes of her health, as letters written by her father reveal: he wrote to David Murray in 1899 that she was "absolutely forbidden to live in Glasgow or anywhere near."[2] When she was three years old her father wrote to her grandmother, "It is a great help she is so intelligent",[3] and he supported her literary activity from an early age.

Her first novel, The Leading Note, was published before she turned twenty, in 1910. E.M. Forster wrote of it to Malcolm Darling in 1911, "The best novels I have come across in the past year are Rosalind Murray's The Leading Note [...] and Wedgwood's Shadow of a Titan."[4] This was followed by Moonseed (1911), Unstable Ways (1914), The Happy Tree (1926, republished in 2014 by Persephone Books) and Hard Liberty (1929), as well as The Greeks (1931), a history book for children with a preface written by her father.[5]

Rosalind married historian Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975) in 1913. They had three sons together: Arnold, Lawrence and Philip Toynbee. Rosalind and Arnold divorced in 1946.[6]

In 1933, Rosalind converted to Catholicism which saw the beginning of her religious writing, including The Good Pagan's Failure (1939), Time and the Timeless (1942), The Life of Faith (1943), The Forsaken Fountain (1948) and The Further Journey: In My End Is My Beginning (1953).[7]

References
  1. Christopher Stray, ‘Murray, (George) Gilbert Aimé (1866–1957)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 accessed 25 Aug 2015.
  2. Letter to David Murray, 31 March 1899, University of Glasgow, Archives and Business Records Centre, Mu.22–f.7 [10]
  3. William H. McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life. Oxford University Press: USA, 1989.
  4. E. M. Forster, Mary Lago and P. N. Furbank (ed.), Selected Letters of E. M. Forster, (London, 1983), 1, p. 123-124; 123, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=20038, accessed: 25 August 2015.
  5. WorldCat: http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3AMurray%2C+Rosalind&qt=hot_author
  6. ‘TOYNBEE, Arnold Joseph’, Who Was Who, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1920–2015; online edn, Oxford University Press, 2014 ; online edn, April 2014 accessed 25 Aug 2015.
  7. WorldCat: http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3AMurray%2C+Rosalind&qt=hot_author.
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