Beck, Lily Adams (Moresby), ‘Louis Moresby’ and ‘E. Barrington’, d. 1931, novelist and writer on the Orient, da. of Jane Willis (Scott) and John M. Her father was an admiral in the Royal Navy (whose memoirs, he said, ‘could not have appeared without the collaboration of my daughter . . . whose literary skill and judgment have given this volume whatever charm it may possess’). She spent many years in Asia before settling in Victoria, BC, 1919. She died in Japan. She began writing late, with short fiction and essays published in periodicals, and she produced about 30 books, beginning in 1921 with a joint translation from Japanese. She wrote a few novels and non-fiction works, many on religion, philosophy and the occult, like The Splendour of Asia (on Buddhism), 1926, and The Story of Oriental Philosophy, 1928. as L. Adams Beck. She also wrote historical romances (British and European) as ‘E. Barrington’ and (Oriental) as ‘Louis Moresby’: as all three she was well received. Her western historical romances are about love and adventure: Glorious Apollo, 1925, is about Byron, The Divine Lady, 1924, about Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson, and The Thunderer, 1927, about Josephine and Napoleon. Her oriental stories deal with eastern mysticism and reincarnation: A Romance of Reincarnation, 1925, describes the effect of eastern mysticism on English men and women. The Garden of Vision, 1929. set in Japan, compares east and west.
— The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. New Haven: Yale UP.
“E. BARRINGTON”
Our Ottawa Correspondent telegraphs that Mrs. L. Adams Beck, long a resident at Victoria, British Columbia, who was known as a writer and also, under the name of “E. Barrington,” as a novelist, has died suddenly at Kyoto, Japan. The daughter of the late Admiral John Moresby and granddaughter of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Fairfax Moresby, she lived for many years in the East and travelled in Little Tibet. She was the author of “The Ninth Vibration,” “The Treasure of Ho,” “The Perfume of the Rainbow,” “The War[sic] of the Stars,” and “The Key of Dreams.” Of her novels perhaps the best known was “Glorious Apollo,” and she also wrote “The Ladies,” “The Chaste Diana,” “The Divine Lady,” “The Splendour of Asia,” and “The Laughing Queen.”
— The Times, 8 January 1931. p. 14.