F. Marion Crawford
F. Marion Crawford was an American author born on August 2, 1854, in Bagni di Lucca, Italy. He was the only son of sculptor Thomas Crawford and Louisa Crawford, linking him to notable Boston families. After his father's early death, Crawford developed a preference for female companionship. He received an eclectic education across several countries, which fueled his writing career after a brief stint as a journalist in India. Initially aspiring to be a professor of Sanskrit, he published his first novel, "Mr. Isaacs," in 1882 and went on to write a total of forty-four novels over twenty-seven years.
Crawford's works, often set in Italy, are characterized by elements of romance, the occult, and historical fiction, with titles such as "Corleone: A Tale of Sicily" reflecting themes of Italian life and culture. He married Elizabeth Berdan in 1884, and their strained relationship later influenced his writing. Despite achieving considerable popularity during his lifetime, Crawford's reputation waned after his death, particularly compared to contemporaries like Henry James and Mark Twain. His later years saw a shift towards historical writing, especially focused on Rome, while his ghost stories gained posthumous recognition.
On this Page
Subject Terms
F. Marion Crawford
- Born: August 2, 1854
- Birthplace: Bagni di Lucca, Italy
- Died: April 9, 1909
- Place of death: Sorrento, Italy
Biography
Francis Marion Crawford was born on August 2, 1854, at Bagni di Lucca, Italy, the only son of Thomas Crawford, sculptor, and Louisa Crawford, through whom Crawford was related to the influential Ward and Howe families of Boston. Crawford’s father died when Marion was only three years old, which perhaps led to his preferring the society of women over men later in life. Although Crawford was educated at various institutions outside of Italy—St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire; Hatfield Broad Oak, in Essex, England, for tutoring; Trinity College, Cambridge, for a year; and the Technische Hochschule at Karlsbad, Germany—he always felt drawn to the country of his birth. Somewhere around 1879, he converted to Roman Catholicism. His family worried about his youthful indolence and spendthrift habits, but he became familiar with the duties and responsibilities of writing during his one-year editorship of the Indian Herald in Allahabad, India, in 1879.
Crawford’s friendship in India with Alexander Jacob led to Crawford’s fictional portrait of Jacob in his first novel, Mr. Isaacs (1882). Up until this point, Crawford had envisaged himself becoming a professor of Sanskrit, but he soon became a prolific novelist, completing forty-four novels during a twenty-seven-year career. His popularity and the regular appearance of his novels resulted in his becoming independently wealthy, and he bought an Italian mansion, the Villa Crawford, near Sorrento, Italy. In 1884, he married Elizabeth Berdan, and they had four children: Eleanor (1886), Harold (1888), and the twins, Clare and Bertram (1890). He and Elizabeth had a falling-out—Crawford hinted at her infidelity—and during the latter part of their marriage, they seemed to lead virtually separate lives, with Crawford at the Villa while his wife was elsewhere in Europe.
Many of Crawford’s novels are set in Italy with an Italian cast of characters, including the prophetically titled Corleone: A Tale of Sicily, which, like Mario Puzo’s later novel about a Sicilian named Corleone (The Godfather), deals with the Mafia. However, unlike Puzo and other later and lurid storytellers, Crawford was a staunch defender of the genteel tradition, and in his critical work, The Novel: What It Is (1893), championed that tradition against William Dean Howells’s support of realism in literature and Henry James’s claims for psychological realism. However, this belief did not stop Crawford from referring to the occult and mysterious in his fiction: theosophy in Mr. Isaacs, Arabian Nights romanticism in Khaled, and clairvoyance and witchcraft in The Witch of Prague.
Crawford had gratified public taste with his historical fiction, but near the end of his life he was increasingly drawn to the writing of pure history, mainly that of Rome. At his death, he could lay claim to the title of most popular American novelist, with three editions of his works published during his lifetime. Yet the reputation of the “great romancer” faded much more quickly than that of his rivals, Howell, James, and Mark Twain, and the more fantastic works for which he is best known today, including his ghost stories, posthumously collected in Wandering Ghosts, are those that he held in least esteem.