Warwick Deeping

Born in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, into a family of physicians, Warwick Deeping was educated at Merchant Taylors' School. He proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study medicine and science (receiving his MA in March 1902), then went to Middlesex Hospital to finish his medical training. During the First World War, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Deeping later gave up his job as a physician to become a full-time writer. He married Phyllis Maude Merrill and lived for the rest of his life in "Eastlands" on Brooklands Road, Weybridge, Surrey. • Illustration — Warwick Deeping in 1932 He was one of the best-selling authors of the 1920s and 1930s, with seven of his novels making the best-seller list. Deeping was a prolific writer of short stories, which appeared in such British magazines as Cassell's, The Story-Teller, and The Strand. He also published fiction in several US magazines, including the Saturday Evening Post and Adventure. All of the short stories and serialised novels in US magazines were reprints of works previously published in Britain. Well over 200 of his original short stories and essays that appeared in various British fiction magazines were never seen in book form during his lifetime.

Deeping's early work is dominated by historical romances. His later novels more usually dealt with modern life, and were critical of many tendencies of twentieth-century civilisation. His standpoint was generally that of a passionate individualism, distrustful both of ruling elites and of the lower classes, who were often presented as a threat to his embattled middle-class protagonists. His most celebrated hero is Captain Sorrell M.C., the ex-officer who after the First World War is reduced to a menial occupation in which he is bullied by those of a lower social class and less education. Deeping's novels often deal with controversial issues. In her 2009 study The Ordeal of Warwick Deeping, Mary Grover lists these: • social work and medicine in the slums (Roper's Row, 1929; The Impudence of Youth, 1946; Paradise Place, 1949.) • gender ambiguity (The Return of the Petticoat, 1907) • alcoholism (A Woman's War, 1907; The Woman at the Door, 1937; The Dark House, 1941) • euthanasia (Sorrell and Son (1925); The Dark House, 1941) • wife abuse and justifiable homicide (The Woman at the Door, 1937) • shell shock (The Secret Sanctuary, 1923) • rape (The White Gate, 1913) • pollution of the water supply (Sincerity, 1912)

• Published posthumously • Time to Heal (1952) • Man in Chains (1953) • The Old World Dies (1954) • Caroline Terrace (1955) • The Serpent's Tooth (1956) • The Sword and the Cross (1957) • The Lost Stories of Warwick Deeping – Volumes I – IX (2013–2024) – A total of over 5000 pages, containing over 250 short stories, novellas, essays and 4 unpublished novels. These works were never published in book form and only appeared in British and American fiction magazines in the 1910s-1930s, such as The Story-Teller, The New Magazine, Cassell's Magazine of Fiction, and The Strand.

* * * * • Works by Warwick Deeping at Project Gutenberg of Australia