Lady Cynthia Asquith
Lady Cynthia Asquith, born Mary Evelyn Charteris on September 27, 1887, was a notable British writer primarily recognized for her ghost stories and her role as an anthologist. She married the poet Herbert Asquith in 1910, which granted her the title of Lady. Her literary works, though limited in number, are characterized by a formal tone and often employ a narrative frame, where one character recounts the story to another. Asquith's protagonists typically hail from the upper echelons of British society, encountering unpleasant ghosts that create a chilling atmosphere without veering into terror. Her stories often feature passive characters and rely on coincidence, leading some modern readers to view her style as quaint or stilted compared to contemporary horror writers. Beyond her own fiction, Asquith was instrumental in preserving the horror and Gothic literature of the Victorian and Edwardian eras through her anthologies. She also served as the private secretary to playwright J. M. Barrie from 1919 to 1937. Lady Cynthia Asquith passed away on March 31, 1960.
On this Page
Subject Terms
Lady Cynthia Asquith
Writer
- Born: September 27, 1887
- Birthplace: Wiltshire, England
- Died: March 31, 1960
- Place of death: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England
Biography
Lady Cynthia Asquith was born Mary Evelyn Charteris on September 27, 1887, to a well-to-do family. She obtained her title when she married the poet Herbert Asquith in 1910. She is best known for a rather small body of ghost stories, all formal in tone.
In her writing, Asquith often used the narrative frame, in which the actual meat of the story is told to one character by another. Most of her protagonists come from the upper classes of British society, and generally have servants who are mentioned in the course of the works. The ghosts encountered by her characters are universally unpleasant, and their presence disturbing, but even when the protagonists die in the course of the stories, they never truly evoke terror. A well-bred lady of her generation, she never crossed the line from the merely chilling to the truly gruesome, and as a result many writers brought up on writers such as Stephen King and Dean Koontz find her works quaint and stilted. Furthermore, her characters are generally passive and acted upon rather than acting, and coincidence rather than deliberate choice frequently drives her stories, elements which readers of later generations often find boring or consider to be evidence of shoddy writing.
In addition to her own work, Lady Asquith became well-known for her work as an anthologist, collecting a large number of horror and Gothic stories of the Victorian and Edwardian era that originally appeared in various magazines and literary journals of the time, and which otherwise would have fallen into complete obscurity. She also produced a number of excellent anthologies of original supernatural fiction, some of which include works by her own hand. During the years from 1919 to 1937, she was the private secretary to the playwright J. M. Barrie, who is best remembered as the creator of Peter Pan. Lady Asquith died on March 31, 1960.