User:Curdle/sandbox/Lillian M. Pyke

Lillian Maxwell Pyke (1881-1927) was an Australian author. She was best known as a children's writer, writing under the name Lillian M. Pyke but also wrote a book of etiquette and three adult novels under the name Erica Maxwell.

Early Life
She was born on 25 August 1881 at Port Fairy (then known as Belfast), Victoria to an English draper, Robert Moseley Heath, and his wife Susannah Ellen, née Wilson. She was their tenth child and one of three daughters. She attended University High School under L.A Adamson, and was a teacher and journalist before marrying Richard Dimond Pyke on on 7 April 1906 in Melbourne. They moved to Queensland where he was employed as an accountant for the railways at a construction camp near Gympie, where their three children were born.( Joyce in 1907, Phyllis in 1908 and Lawrence in 1912). Richard registered a complaint of corrupt practices regarding an engineer in November 1914, which were dismissed by management. On 4 December, Richard Pyke shot himself.

Lillian and the children returned to Melbourne, where she turned to writing to support them. Over the next eleven years, she averaged around two books annually.

Books
Her books were mostly centred around school life, and improving themes, and based on what she was familiar with. Her girls books set at the fictional Riverview were modelled from University High, which she and her daughters attended; and St Virgil's was based on Wesley College where her son was educated. Now considered old fashioned "odes to the British school class system", at the time they were very popular, and compared with the works of Mary Grant Bruce and Ethel Turner.

Wife by Proxy

Brothers of the fleet

Death
She had been in ill health for some time, and died on 31 August 1927 at St Andrew's Hospital, Brighton from renal disease. Her funeral service was presided over by the Rev. Charles Strong, and she was later buried at Box Hill Cemetery.

Her son Lawrence later became Dean at Melbourne University; her grandson is the physicist John Pyke.