Romer Wilson (1891–1930)

Romer Wilson was the pen name of Florence Roma Muir Wilson, born in Sheffield, England, the daughter of Conservative politician and solicitor Arnold Muir Wilson. She attended West Heath School in Ham and then enrolled at Girton College, Cambridge, the first women's college in the UK, to study law. She graduated in 1914, as World War I was beginning, and went to work for the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries. She took the pseudonym Romer Wilson for her writing. Her debut novel Martin Schüler was a literary sensation when it was published in 1919. Her second novel, If All These Young Men, also published in 1919, was a character study of a group of 20-something friends in England coping with the looming presence of the war in their lives. In 1921, she received the Hawthornden Prize for her third novel The Death of Society. Other works included Green Magic (1928), a collections of fairy tales from around the world, and the romantic biography All Alone: The Life and Private History of Emily Jane Brontë (1928). Wilson was in Italy correcting proofs of her fourth novel, The Grand Tour (1923), when she met Edward Joseph O'Brien, an American, and married him shortly afterwards. In 1928, they moved to Switzerland and settled in Locarno. She died at age 38 in 1930 from tuberculosis.