Charles Langbridge Morgan

Charles Langbridge Morgan studied at Brasenose College. The recorded working language is English. Positions recorded include president. Distinctions recorded are Hawthornden Prize, James Tait Black Memorial Prize, honorary doctor of Caen University and honorary doctor of the University of Toulouse.

• Born — 22 January 1894 • Died — 6 February 1958 • Occupation — Playwright, novelist • Spouse — Hilda Vaughan • Relatives — Charles Langbridge Morgan (father)

His maternal grandparents had emigrated to Australia from Pembrokeshire. His paternal grandparents were from Gloucestershire and Devon in England. His parents were married in Australia. His father, Sir Charles Langbridge Morgan, was a railway civil engineer, and at one time was President of the Institution of Civil Engineers. Morgan himself was born in Bromley, Kent. He was educated at the Naval Colleges of Osborne and Dartmouth and served as a midshipman in the China Fleet until 1913 when he returned to England to take the entrance examinations for Oxford. On the outbreak of war, he rejoined the navy but was sent with Churchill's Naval Division to the defence of Antwerp. He was interned in the Netherlands which provided the setting for his best-selling novel The Fountain. Some of his early poems were published in The Westminster Gazette. "To America" (1917) was included in A Treasury of World Poetry, edited by George Herbert Clarke. After World War I, he took his degree at Brasenose College, Oxford.

After an unsuccessful relationship with Mary, a daughter of Alfred Mond, 1st Baron Melchett, he married the Welsh novelist Hilda Vaughan in 1923. They had two children: Dame Shirley Paget, Marchioness of Anglesey, and Roger Morgan, who became Librarian of the House of Lords Library. He was the drama critic of The Times from the 1920s until 1938, and contributed weekly articles on the London theatre to The New York Times. He wrote a series of articles for The Times Literary Supplement under the byline "Menander's Mirror" from 1942, and many articles for The Sunday Times. His first play, The Flashing Stream (1938), had successful runs in London and Paris but was not well received in New York. The River Line (1952) was originally written as a novel in 1949 and concerned the activities of escaped British prisoners of war in France during World War II.

Morgan employed Esmé Valerie Fletcher as his private secretary when she moved to London from Leeds in her determination to enter London literary circles and find a way to meet T. S. Eliot, her future husband. She acknowledged her gratitude to Morgan for providing her with her first opportunity and later spoke of her respect for him as an author in private discussions with her family and friends.

• The Gunroom (1919) • My Name is Legion (1925) • Portrait in a Mirror (1929) • The Fountain (1932) • Sparkenbroke (1936) • The Voyage (1940) • The Empty Room (1941) • The Judge's Story (1947) • The River Line (1949) • A Breeze of Morning (1951) • Challenge to Venus (1957)

• The Flashing Stream (1938) • The River Line (1952) • The Burning Glass (1953)

• Epitaph on George Moore (1935) • The House of Macmillan: (1843–1943) (1943) • Reflections in a Mirror (in two volumes 1944, 1946) • Liberties of the Mind (1951) • The Writer and his World (1960) • Dramatic Critic: selected reviews (1922–1939), selected and edited by Roger Morgan (Oberon Books 2013)

• Ode to France (1942) • The Collected Poems of Charles Morgan (2008)

• De Pange, Victor, Morgan, Classiques du XXe siècle (Paris: Editions universitaires, 1962) • Duffin, Henry Charles, The Novels and Plays of Charles Morgan. (London: Bowes and Bowes, 1959) • Lewis, Eiluned (ed.), Selected Letters of Charles Morgan (London/Melbourne: Macmillan, 1967) • Jackson, Nigel, The Seed That Falls: the Eleven Novels of Charles Morgan (Melbourne: Nigel Jackson, 2018)