A naval family and a late literary career
Born in 1862 into a British naval family, she was the daughter of John Moresby, who surveyed waters off New Guinea, and granddaughter of Admiral Fairfax Moresby. Travel in Asia shaped the religious and philosophical subjects she took up in fiction. With her husband Ralph Adams Beck she settled in Victoria, British Columbia, where her literary career gathered pace.
Much of her published work appeared in the last decade of her life. The Ninth Vibration and Other Stories, issued by Dodd, Mead in 1922, collected pieces that had already found readers in periodicals. Her acknowledgements to the editors preserve that first stage in the stories’ circulation. She died in Kyoto in 1931.
A name on a title page
The Openers of the Gate, published in 1930, brings L. Adams Beck and E. Barrington together on its title page. Beck’s preface explains that she understood even the stories set in the West through a philosophical framework she associated with Asia. That is an account of the novelist’s own reading and beliefs. It helps explain why characters in different countries encounter recognisably similar questions about knowledge, death and the possibility of another life.
