Margery Williams

Margery Williams (1881–1944) was an English writer who spent much of her life in America. She was born in London, the daughter of a barrister and classical scholar who read with his girls and made the people in books come alive for them. He died when she was seven, and in 1890 the family crossed to the United States, first to New York and then to a farm in Pennsylvania. At nineteen she went back to London to earn her living by writing, and her first novel, written for adults, came out in 1902.

In London she met Francesco Bianco, an Italian who worked for her publisher, and they married in 1904. They lived in Paris and then in Turin, where he served in the Italian army during the First World War. While her son Cecco and her daughter Pamela were small, she wrote little. Pamela turned out to be a gifted painter who exhibited in Turin, London and New York while still a child, and in 1921 the family moved to New York and settled in Greenwich Village.

The Velveteen Rabbit grew out of the children’s own nursery toys, a stuffed rabbit called Tubby and an old skin horse. The story first ran in Harper’s Bazaar in 1921 with pictures by Pamela, and the book followed in 1922 with lithographs by William Nicholson, published at the same time in London and New York. She wrote for children for the rest of her life, and her novel Winterbound was named a Newbery Honor book in 1937. She died in New York in 1944.