ABSTRACT
In a career spanning more than forty years, Margery Lawrence (1889–1969) published best-selling novels and supernatural fiction that frequently highlighted an often-troubled past and its effect on the living. During the 1920s—her first decade as a professional author—Lawrence published numerous supernatural stories in popular literary magazines, eventually turning many of these pieces into the collections Nights of the Round Table (1926), its sequel The Terraces of Night (1932), and The Floating Café (1936). Yet despite the contemporary critical and commercial success of the three collections, Margery Lawrence is all but forgotten among scholars of the supernatural. Along with her contemporaries Elizabeth Bowen, Violet Hunt, May Sinclair, and Eleanor Scott, Lawrence produced some of the most socially conscious supernatural fiction of the early twentieth century. Her lifelong belief in spiritualism and the occult channeled itself into narratives that examine the inner workings of the mind and the violent impulses that lurk just beneath otherwise calm and “normal” human exteriors. 1
