Oliver Onions

For the Italian musicians who use the pseudonym Oliver Onions, see Guido & Maurizio De Angelis.

Oliver Onions.

George Oliver Onions^[1] (13 November 1873 – 9 April 1961) was a significant English novelist who published over forty novels and story collections. Originally trained as a commercial artist, he worked as a designer of posters and books, and as a magazine illustrator, before starting his career in writing. The first editions of his novels were published with dust jackets bearing full-colour illustrations painted by Onions himself. He married the writer Berta Ruck in 1909 and they had two sons, Arthur (born 1912) and William (born 1913). Onions legally changed his name to George Oliver in 1918, but continued to publish under the name Oliver Onions.

Besides detective fiction, historical fiction and a science fiction novel, New Moon (1918), Onions wrote several collections of ghost stories, of which the best known is Widdershins (1911). It includes the novella The Beckoning Fair One, widely regarded as one of the best in the genre of horror fiction, especially psychological horror. On the surface, this is a conventional haunted house story: an unsuccessful writer moves into rooms in an otherwise empty house, in the hope that isolation will help his failing creativity. His sensitivity and imagination are enhanced by his seclusion, but his art, his only friend and his sanity are all destroyed in the process. The story can be read as narrating the gradual possession of the protagonist by a mysterious and possessive feminine spirit, or as a realistic description of a psychotic outbreak culminating in catatonia and murder, told from the sufferer's point of view. The precise description of the slow disintegration of the protagonist's mind is terrifying in either case. Another theme, shared with others of Onions' stories, is a connection between creativity and insanity; in this view, the artist is in danger of withdrawing from the world altogether and losing himself in his creation.

Onions was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his 1946 novel Poor Man's Tapestry.

Partial bibliography

Novels

• The Compleat Bachelor (1901)
• In Accordance with the Evidence (1910)
• The Story of Ragged Robyn (1912)
• Gray Youth (1913)
• The Debit Account (1913)
• The Story of Louie (1913)
• Mushroom Town (1914)
• The New Moon: A Romance of Reconstruction (1918)
• A Case in Camera (1920)
• The Tower of Oblivion (1921)
• The Spite of Heaven (1926)
• The Open Secret (1930)
• A Certain Man (1932)
• Hand of Kornelius Voyt (1939)
• Poor Man's Tapestry (1946)
• Arras of Youth (1949)
• A Penny for the Harp (1952)
• Bells Rung Backward (1953)
• A Shilling to Spend (1965)
• Catalan Circus (1969)

Ghost story collections (general collections omitted)

• Back 'O The Moon (1906)
• Widdershins (1911)
• Ghosts in Daylight (1924)
• The Painted Face (1929)
• The Collected Ghost Stories (Nicholson & Watson (London), 1935)
• The Collected Ghost Stories (Tartarus Press (Carlton-in-Coverdale, North Yorkshire), 2000; expanded edition)
• The Dead of Night: The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions (Wordsworth Editions (London), 2010; ISBN: 978-1-84022-640-9)

References

1. ^ Pronounced by his family as in the vegetable, not oh-NY-ons.

Sources

• Leonard R. N. Ashley, 'Onions, (George) Oliver (1873–1961)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
• Oliver Onions http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/o/oliver-onions/

External links

• Works by Oliver Onions at Project Gutenberg
• The Beckoning Fair One – text available online as part of Nina Auerbach's course reading

Persondata
Name	Onions, Oliver
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	13 November 1873
Place of birth
Date of death	9 April 1961
Place of death