Red Magic

by Romer Wilson

A COLLECTION OF THE WORLD';S BEST FAIRY TALES FROM ALL COUNTRIES by Romer Wilson; illustrated by Kay Nielsen.

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1930

About the author

During a brief writing career (almost entirely limited to the 1920s) Romer Wilson wrote produced novels, two novellas, a play, a biography, and a posthumously published collection of short stories. She compiled and edited three volumes of fairy tales from around the world. Her novels, highly philosophical and sometimes lyrically overblown, treat the existential and epistemological dilemmas facing postwar Europe. Many of her protagonists are artists or philosophers struggling to achieve or understand perfection in a world riven with suffering and imperfection. She often explores the impact of love and the effects on society of war or of mechanisation, in fiction which suggests a longing for a pre-industrial pastoral past. (From: http://orlando.cambridge.org/public/s... )

From Virginia Woolf's letter to Sydney Waterlow (number 1176), May 23, 1921: "I am reading Miss Romer Wilson's new novel [The Death of Society], which Jack Squire says is the greatest work of genius ever written by a woman (or words to that effect). Naturally one doesn't like that. And I am hopeless at judging novels. I keep thinking that I should write them better."

Romer Wilson's The Death of Society won the Hawthornden Prize in 1921.

Born: 26 December 1891 Florence Roma Muir Wilson
Died: 11 January 1930 RW died of tuberculosis at Lausanne in Switzerland