Margerie Bonner

Margerie Bonner (17 February 1905 – 28 September 1988) was an actress, scriptwriter, and novelist who is best known as the wife of Malcolm Lowry and for her support of the author while he wrote his best known novel, Under the Volcano, considered one of the finest novels of the 20th century.

The younger sister of silent screen star Priscilla Bonner, she also appeared in several films (spelling her first name Marjorie), among them Cecil B. DeMille's The King of Kings (1927), The Sign of the Cross (1932), and the talkie Cleopatra (1934). By the late 1930s her movie career was over and she was working as a personal assistant to the actress Penny Singleton.

On June 7, 1939, she met British author Malcolm Lowry on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Western Avenue at the time he had had begun the second draft of Under the Volcano. They married in 1940 and settled in a beach shack in Dollarton, a small town near Vancouver, British Columbia. Bonner wrote scripts for CBC Radio and worked with Lowry on a screenplay for the F. Scott Fitzgerald novel Tender Is the Night. She wrote three novels during the 1940s. Two were mystery novels, The Shapes That Creep (1944) and The Last Twist of the Knife (1946) (both "in the vein of Agatha Christie"); a third was "a more ambitious novel about human passions, dreams, and failure", Horse in the Sky (1947). A fourth novel, The Castle of Malatesta, was a psychological novel that remained in manuscript.

She is chiefly remembered for her unsung role in the creation of Lowry's masterpiece, Under the Volcano (1947). Not only did she provide the supportive environment her husband needed in order to write, she meticulously edited the novel's manuscript while various passages were rewritten at her suggestion. Since Lowry had a tendency toward verbosity, her most frequent editorial comment was "cut". She is widely “considered to be the model for its central female character, the consul's wife, Yvonne."

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