Background
Arthur Machen, original name, Arthur Llewellyn Jones, took mother’s maiden name, Machen, in childhood. He was born on March 3, 1863, in Caerleon-on-Usk, Wales, to John Edward Jones, a clergyman, and Janet Machen.
journalist novelist writer author
Arthur Machen, original name, Arthur Llewellyn Jones, took mother’s maiden name, Machen, in childhood. He was born on March 3, 1863, in Caerleon-on-Usk, Wales, to John Edward Jones, a clergyman, and Janet Machen.
At the age of eleven, Machen studied at Hereford Cathedral School, where he received an excellent classical education. The natural world of the Welsh countryside and the extensive collection of books in his father’s library helped develop Machen’s imagination. After moving to London after the death of his parents, Machen attended college for a time with the intention of becoming a surgeon. But his interest in writing led him to try his hand at journalism.
Machen’s first taste of success came with the publication of “The Great God Pan” in 1894, a tale which became “the archetypal Decadent horror story” according to Brian Stableford in the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers.
After the appearance of The Three Imposters, it was eleven years before Machen published another book of fiction. During this time he worked as a translator and journalist to earn a living, suffered the death of his wife, and joined the Order of the Golden Dawn, a magical occult organization whose members included William Butler Yeats and Aleister Crowley. He also took a job as an actor for the Benson Shakespeare Repertory Company in 1901.
In 1906 Machen published a new collection of his fantastical stories, The House of Souls, the standout story of which is “The White People,” probably Machen’s most-anthologized work. Machen’s greatest popular success was the short story “The Bowmen,” which was set during World War I.
After the war, Machen was finally discovered and received some deserved attention. Many of his stories were reprinted in the United States and Britain, and he wrote three autobiographies. Far Off Things (1922) takes the reader back to Machen’s inspirational days in Gwent when he was learning to write. Things Near and Far (1923) is also a kind of romantic reverie about the life he has lead.
During this period of popular success in the 1920s, Machen’s excessive creativity and productivity would taper off. However, though in his late fifties, he would still publish a few works of note. In 1936, The Cosy Room and Other Stories and The Children of the Pool and Other Stories both appeared. The former included the story “N,” which revives some of Machen’s best traits of honor and high emotion. In it, the narrator, Jacob Boehme, searches for an alternative reality. By the 1940s, Machen’s popularity had waned once again. He lived out the rest of his years in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, not far from London.
From the beginning of his literary career, Machen espoused a mystical belief that the humdrum ordinary world hid a more mysterious and strange world beyond. Machen, brought up as the son of a Church of England clergyman, always held Christian beliefs, though accompanied by a fascination with sensual mysticism; his interests in paganism and the occult were especially prominent in his earliest works.
After his experimentation with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, the orthodox ritual of the Church became ever more important to him, gradually defining his position as a High Church Anglican who was able to incorporate elements from his own mystical experiences, Celtic Christianity, and readings in literature and legend into his thinking.
Machen was deeply suspicious of science, materialism, commerce, and Puritanism, all of which were anathema to Machen's conservative, bohemian, mystical, and ritualistic temperament.
Machen was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn.
Machen was a great enthusiast for literature that expressed the "rapture, beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense of the unknown, desire for the unknown" that he summed up in the word ecstasy. His main passions were for writers and writing.
Quotes from others about the person
"Machen is an important influence on modern fantasy writers such as H. P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury, but also much of his writing expresses a wonderful vision of mystical union that is a foundation for the fantastic in literature.” - Donald M. Hassler
“Machen was a tough and amusing journalist, a charming autobiographer and letter writer who knew his own real world, and a skillful translator who knew the real worlds of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. But what he loved best was the mystical and mysterious world beneath and beyond the surface of the material world that made him an influential creator of fantasy.” - Donald M. Hassler
“More than Hawthorne or Tolstoy, Machen is a novelist of the soul. He writes of a strange borderland, lying somewhere between Dreams and Death, peopled with shades, beings, spirits, ghosts, men, women, souls. There are those who will call him a novelist of Sin, quibbling about a definition. With these I have no quarrel; the characterizations are synonymous. His books exhale all evil and all corruption; yet they are as pure as the fabled waters of that crystal spring De Leon sought.” - Vincent Starred
“Machen wrote not prose at all, but poetry, and poetry of a high order. And it is from such exquisite manipulation of words, phrases and rhythms that Machen attains his most clairvoyant and arresting effects in the realms of horror and dread and terror and beauty.” - Vincent Starred
On August 31, 1887, Arthur Machen married Amy Hogg, but she died in 1899, and Machen married Purefoy Hudleston in 1903. From his second marriage, Arthur had two children: Hilary and Janet.