Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall (14 September 1883, in Gunnersbury, London – 22 April 1922, in Vancouver) was a Canadian writer who was born in England but lived in Canada from the time she was seven.

She developed her skills at composition and made lasting friendships at these schools, despite poor health and suffering from headaches, dental, eye and back problems.

[4] In July 1903 Pickthall's short story The Greater Gift was featured in the first edition of East and West (Toronto), a church magazine for young people.

Three serials she wrote for the magazine – Dick's Desertion: A Boy's Adventures in Canadian Forests (1905), The Straight Road (1906), and Billy's Hero, or, The Valley of Gold (1908) – were published as juvenile novels, illustrated by Charles William Jefferys.

[1] In 1904 her poem "The Homecomers" won third prize in a poetry contest and caught the attention of Pelham Edgar, professor of English at the University of Toronto's Victoria College.

[1] In her absence from Canada, Macphail's University Magazine published Pickthall's first collection of poetry, The Drift of Pinions, "in an edition of 1,000 boxed copies that sold out in ten days in November, 1913.

"[8] In England, Pickthall first stayed with her uncle, Dr. Frank Reginald Mallard, in Hammersmith and then began renting Chalke Cottage in Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, with her second cousin Edith Emma Whillier.

[1] In May 1918 health problems forced her to quit as assistant librarian in the South Kensington Meteorological Office, so she returned to Bowerchalke and completed 20 stories by the end of the year, "half of which were sold by January.

"[9] Marjorie Pickthall "stood as proof in the eyes of the next generation of female poets that women could indeed earn the respect and attention of a literary establishment dominated by men.

By 1913, when her first book of poetry was released: "For once the reviewers and critics generally were of one opinion that the work was the product of genius undefiled and radiant, dwelling in the realm of pure beauty and singing with perfect naturalness its divine message."

[10] Garvin quoted from the book review in Saturday Night magazine: At Pickthall's death, Pelham Edgar wrote: "Her talent was strong and pure and tender, and her feeling for beauty was not more remarkable than her unrivalled gift for expressing it."

In his 1925 biography, Marjorie Pickthall: A Book of Remembrance, Lorne Pierce could point to ten poetic tributes from top Canadian poets.

Pickthall's strengths, as he saw them, were "grace and charm, restrained Christian mysticism, and unfailing cadence;" her weaknesses, "preoccupation with the unearthly, with death and regret, with loneliness and grief, where the tendency is toward emotional interpretations of life, and rapture and intuition are substituted for the discipline of reason.

"[12] For Pierce, Pickthall had already begun to repeat herself by the time of her first book: "'Bega,' 'The Little Sister of the Prophet,' and 'The Bridgegroom of Cana,' all published in 1909, ... [show] the full maturity of her powers.

When Drift of Pinions ... appeared in 1913, she had already written much of her best poetry, and was to continue not only the repetition of her favourite attitudes and metaphors, but even the vocabulary that included such words as gray, little, silver, rose, dreams, mist, dove, and moth.

"[12] Northrop Frye, for one, found Pierce's judgement too dismissive: "The introduction is written with much sympathy, but tends to confirm the usual view of this poet as a diaphanous late romantic whose tradition died with her....

Her poems draw upon a body of literary precedents in order to construct a coherent and fantastic defence against unsatisfied desire and what she perceived to be a fundamental incoherence in modern life."

"In each book a boy or young man, isolated by orphanhood or financial straits, is forced to undertake a journey, during which he must solve a trying problem; its solution, through a combination of luck ('Providence'), a new spiritual and moral rectitude, and a fresh sense of duty, leads to his re-integration into the family or society.

"[citation needed] The Encyclopedia of Literature says: "Of Pickthall's adult fiction, Little Hearts (1915), set in the eighteenth-century Devonshire countryside, and The Bridge: A Story of the Great Lakes (1922), employ melodramatic incident."

Poet and critic Anne Compton wrote of Pickthall's first novel: "Little Hearts (1915) reveals an Impressionist's awareness of light and confirms Robert Garrett's observation that '[f]ew writers know how to paint air as she does.'

"[8] Because "Pickthall's reputation rests predominantly on her career as a poet," says the Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama, "her play The Wood Carver's Wife has only recently gained the critical attention it deserves.

"[1] The plot, set in pre-Conquest Quebec, concerns a carver who "murders his wife's lover in order to have a model for the proper expression of grief for his wooden pietà.

Here Pickthall's use of synaesthesia conveys her vision of the complex web of human and natural realms, in which masculine containment contrasts with feminine intertwining.

"[1] "The Wood Carver's Wife touches on issues of gender, race, and eroticism, all charged with violence and intensity that though not easily accessible in the 1920s ultimately became an object of great interest for modern feminist critics.