In a later interview ( Daily Independent, 16 September 1937) she is quoted as saying, ‘I never regretted that year in business as it gave me a contact with the world of affairs’. In due course the Sharps, too, arrived back in suburban London, to the Streatham house in which Margery’s parents were to live for the rest of their lives.įrom 1914 to 1923 Margery received a good academic education at Streatham Hill High School (now Streatham and Clapham High School) although family financial difficulties meant she was unable to proceed to university and, instead, worked for a year as a shorthand-typist in the City of London, ‘with a firm that dealt with asphalt’. Over 50 years later she set part of her novel Sun in Scorpio (1965) in Malta, rejoicing in the Mediterranean sunlight which made everything sparkle, contrasting it with the dull suburb to which her characters returned., where ‘everything dripped’. His family accompanied him and while there Margery attended Sliema’s Chiswick House High School, a recently founded ‘establishment for Protestant young ladies’.
Malta became a reality for the Sharps when from 1912 to 1913 John was seconded to the island. By 1901 John Sharp was clerking in the War Office, perhaps in a department dealing with Britain’s garrison in Malta, as this might explain why Margery was given the rather exotic third name of ‘Melita’ (the personification of Malta).
Margery’s mother, to whom Rhododendron Pie is dedicated, was by the age of fifteen already working as a book-keeper, probably in her father’s silversmithing workshop. The education he had received at Sheffield’s Brunswick Wesleyan School had enabled him to prevail against the competition, which, for such a desirable position, was fierce. Both parents came from families of Sheffield artisans and romance had flourished, although it was only in 1890 that they married, after John Sharp had moved to London and passed the Civil Service entrance examination as a 2nd division clerk.
She had determined from an early age to become a self-supporting author and over a period of about fifty years was to publish twenty-two novels for adults, thirteen stories for children, four plays, two mysteries, and numerous short stories, delighting readers old and young on both sides of the Atlantic.īorn with, as one interviewer testified, ‘wit and a profound common sense’, Clara Margery Melita Sharp (1905-1991) was the youngest of the three daughters of John Henry Sharp (1865-1953) and his wife, Clara Ellen (1866-1946).
Of the writing of her first novel, Rhododendron Pie (1930), Margery Sharp commented, with remarkable sang-froid, ‘I allowed myself a month for it because that seemed a suitable time to spend over a book’.
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