Last update March
21, 2009
The Grigsby Connection
Four
women and Korea: Joan, Lilian, Mary and Jessie
Joan Savell Grigsby, Lilian May Miller,
Mary Linley Taylor, Jessie McLaren
Four remarkable women. One was born in Scotland, one in Japan,
one in England, one in Australia.
Joan Grigsby forms a link between them, for she lived in Mary
Taylor’s home in Seoul, and Lilian had been Joan’s friend during
the time she spent in Japan a few years earlier while Jessie
helped her discover Korea.
Joan was a poet, Lilian an artist, Mary had been an
actress, Jessie was a translator and teacher.
1.
Joan Grigsby Part One (The family
origins and the childhood of Joan Rundall)
Part Two, Joan Rundall
and Arthur Grigsby, their marriage, travels to Canada,
Japan, Korea and back to Vancouver.
Part Three, Faith
Norris's account of the Grigsby family's stay in Seoul
1929-1930
Lists of English translations of Korean poetry usually begin with
The Orchid Door: Ancient Korean Poems by Joan S.
Grigsby (Kobe: 1935). But no copy of her book is available
in any library in Korea and virtually nobody knows who she was or
what poems she included in her volume. The book itself tells us little. Published in 1935
by J. L. Thompson & Co. (Retail) Ltd. in Kobe, Japan, it is in
Japanese style, the text printed on one side of thin paper which
is then folded to produce recto-verso pages, bound in boards
covered with pale blue silk, it is illustrated with five
black-and-white prints by Lilian M. Miller.
There exists a biography of Joan Grigsby, Dreamer in Five
Lands, written by her daughter, Faith G. (Grigsby) Norris, a
professor of English literature at Oregon State University from
1946 until she retired in 1980. In April 1992 Faith Norris died.
Her family resolved to have the memoir published as a memorial and
in 1993 it was published by a tiny Oregon press, Drift Creek
Press, in a thousand copies.
There were many secrets about her mother that Faith Norris never
suspected, and rather too many details that she got wrong, but
thanks to this memoir, it is possible to begin to situate The
Orchid Door and the other volumes of poetry she wrote in
their human context. By it, we know that Joan was born in Scotland
in 1891, married Arthur Grigsby in 1912, published 3 volumes of
poetry, arrived in Japan via Canada in 1924, spent the years
1929-30 in Korea, moved to Vancouver and died there of cancer in
1937, still young.
These pages have been prepared with much help from Joan Grigsby's
granddaughter in California, her nephew in Cambridge, England, and
Arthur Grigsby's grandnephew in Nicaragua. Without the Internet
and Google searching, none of this would have been possible.
Photos
of Joan
The family history of Joan's
husband Arthur and some photos of the Grigsby
family
The poems of Joan Rundall / Joan S. Grigsby
1916 : Songs of the Grey
Country
Read: The
Poems [also in a PDF
file for easier printing]
1919 : Peatsmoke
Read: The Poems
[also in a PDF file for easier
printing]
1919 : Not Naughty Now (poems for children)
Read: The
Poems [also in a
PDF file for easier printing]
1929 :Lanterns by the Lake
Read: The
Poems of Korea about her first impressions of Korea
Read: The
Poems [also in a
PDF file for easier printing]
1931: Two poems published in Asia
magazine, perhaps her last original poems to be published.
1935: An article
published in Asia magazine using material from The
Orchid Door with prints by Lilian Miller, perhaps sent in at
a time when she was not sure that the full collection would ever
be published.
1935 : The Orchid Door Ancient
Korean Poems
Read: The
Introduction
Read: The
Poems [also in a
PDF file for easier printing]
Read: The Poems with
the James Gale translations on which they are based
An article on "Medievalism
and Joan Grigsby’s The Orchid Door" in which I discuss
her debt to the poems of "Fiona McLeod"
2. Lilian Miller
Of all the Western artists who lived and
studied in Japan before the Pacific War, Lilian May Miller was
probably the only one who was born there. She was schooled under
prestigious Japanese masters until her father accepted a
position with the State Department in 1909. She graduated from
Vassar College and shortly thereafter returned to Japan to
continue studying painting. Her father was now the Consul
General in Seoul. In 1919, she was one of only 5 top
prize-winning artists in a Japanese competition of 500
paintings. She turned to woodblock prints the following year.
She published one collection of poems, Grass Blades from a
Cinnamon Garden, in 1927. Her father died in 1932. In
1935, she helped Joan Grigsby publish The Orchid Door in
Kobe after British publishers had refused it. In 1936,
after Japanese radical officers assassinated several leading
politicians, Miller and her mother moved to Honolulu and from
there to California. The attack on Pearl Harbor mobilized Miller
to store her brushes and she signed on with a Naval counter
propaganda branch as a Japanese Censor and Research Analyst. In
1935, Miller had had surgery for a large cancerous tumor and in
1942 another tumor was discovered. Lilian Miller died in 1943 at
age 47.
See a slideshow of her Korean prints
or view a
selection of her woodblock prints of Japanese and
Korean subjects
1927: Grass
Blades from a Cinnamon Garden
Read: The Poems [also
in a PDF file for easier
printing]
Read: a few of the Poems (mostly those
on Korean topics)
3. Mary Taylor
Born in 1889, Hilda Mouat-Biggs grew up as a doctor's daughter in
Cheltenham, England. She was not interested in studying but longed
to be an actress. When her chance came, at the start of the First
World War, she took the stage name Mary Linley after a famous
'ancestor,' toured in England, then set off as a member of a
touring company that was to act plays across India, Sri Lanka,
Malaya, and as far as Japan. In Japan she met "Bruce" Taylor
(really "Albert" but he disliked the name), the owner of gold
mines in Korea, where he had been living for many years. He joined
her months later in Calcutta, proposed the same day, and they were
married on June 15, 1917 in Bombay. Their son Bruce was born as
Korea was demanding Independence from Japan in 1919. In 1923,
their splendid house, named Dilkusha
(heart's delight) after the ruined palace she had once visited in
Lucknow, arose on a hill above Seoul. Then Bruce fell gravely ill
and in 1925 or so, while he was being treated in California and
Mary was with him, Dilkusha was struck by lightning. It was
rebuilt and in early 1929 Joan Grigsby, with Arthur her husband
and Faith her daughter, moved into rooms on the upper floor. Mary
Taylor returned later in 1929, and introduced Joan to many
interesting people. Alas, she does not mention the Grigsbys in her
autobiography, Chain of Amber, which is an impressive
account of life in Korea under Japanese occupation. Forced to
leave at the start of the Pacific War, she only returned once,
briefly, in 1948, to bury her husband's ashes beside his father's
grave in Seoul. She died in 1982 in California. Her autobiography,
Chain of Amber, was published in 1992.
Photos of Mary
A page about the Tickell family
to which Mary's mother belonged
4. Jessie McLaren
who gave Joan Grigsby her translations of the poems by kisaeng
Jessie and her husband were not perhaps very close to
Joan, but Faith Norris says it was Jessie who first made Joan
aware of the harsh lives Korean women had to endure. Then, shortly
before the Grigsbys left Korea, Jessie gave her copies of her
translations of poems by Gisaeng which she then included in The
Orchid Door.
Other remarkable people named in these pages:
The Boydell
family from Australia were living in Dilkusha and
welcomed the Grigsby family there when they arrived in Seoul in
1929. They too have a story to tell.
Elizabeth Keith was an artist of the same period who also depicted
Korea as well as Japan in her work.
The Anglican Bishop of Seoul, Mark Napier Trollope, encouraged Joan to learn more about Korea, as did Dr.
H. H. Underwood. Read Dr.
Underwood's tribute to the Bishop, who died only a few days / weeks after the Grigsbys left
Korea.
The Canadian missionary and scholar
James Scarth Gale (see: outline chronology) seems
to have inspired Joan by his History of the Korean People
(Richard Rutt edited a reprint with a biography of Gale, it is
available from the RAS-KB) which provided her with most
of the translations she was to transform and paraphrase for The
Orchid Door. He left Korea in 1927 and spent his retirement
in Bath, England, dying there in 1937, just a few months before Joan Grigsby. See the
Gale Archive (PDF file) in the
Library of the University of Toronto, Canada.