Name Elizabeth Moresby Role Novelist | Parents John Moresby Grandparents Fairfax Moresby | |
Died January 3, 1931, Kyoto, Kyoto Prefecture, Japan Books The story of oriental philosophy, The ninth vibration - and other, The Ladies, The Empress of Hearts, The garden of vision | ||
Elizabeth Louisa "Lily" Moresby (1862 – 3 January 1931) was a British-born novelist who became the first prolific, female fantasy writer in Canada.
The daughter of the Royal Navy Captain John Moresby, Moresby lived and traveled widely in the East, in Egypt, India, China, Tibet and Japan but settled eventually in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada in 1919. There is, however, some degree of uncertainty about her early life.
Moresby was sixty years old by the time she started writing her novels, which commonly had an oriental setting. She also wrote under the names Lily Adams Beck, Elizabeth Louisa Beck, Eliza Louisa Moresby Beck, Lily Moresby Adams and E. Barrington.
She was married twice: first to a Royal Navy commander Edward Western Hodgkinson who died around 1910 and then, in 1912, to retired solicitor Ralph Coker Adams Beck.
She began her career by writing for The Atlantic Monthly, Asia, and the Japanese Gassho. These were gathered into a collection in 1926. According to the historian Charles Lillard, she was also a distinguished writer of esoteric works such as The Story of Oriental Philosophy (1928) and The Splendor of Asia (1926). She has been noted as a major writer of Theosophy. Beck's stories collected in The Opener of the Gate feature an occult detective inspired by the "John Silence" stories of Algernon Blackwood. Glorious Apollo, a fictionalized biography of Byron by E. Barrington, was a bestseller during the 1920s. The 1929 film The Divine Lady was based on her 1924 novel also published under the E. Barrington pseudonym.
Beck continued to write until her death in 1931 in Kyoto, Japan.