MARWICK, Helen Lillie 1915-2003
(Helen Lillie)

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born September 13, 1915, in Glasgow, Scotland; died of cancer January 9, 2003, in Washington, DC. Journalist, novelist, and author. Marwick, whose writing appeared under her maiden name, Helen Lillie, was a career journalist whose weekly "Washington Letter" in the Glasgow Herald did much to entertain and educate her Scottish readers about daily life in America for some twenty years. Marwick began her career as a researcher and writer of press releases for the quasi-legal British Security Coordination, based in New York City during World War II and headed by the spy leader known as "Intrepid." Her mission was to locate and write about interesting tidbits of news that would present the British to American readers in a positive light, but Marwick's "Washington Letter" accomplished the reverse, according to some of her critics. She also worked as a New York correspondent for the Manila Times and for various other periodicals. Marwick once told CA that her favorite writing was "gothic suspense stories," and she published several of these, especially in her later years. Marwick wrote a trilogy set in Scotland and New York at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries: Home to Strathblane, Strathblane and Away, and The Rocky Island. Other novels included The Listening Silence and Call down the Sky. Marwick's Herald columns were collected in History on My Doorstep, published in 2000.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

books

Lillie, Helen, A New Kind of Life: An Informal Biography, Argyll Publishing, 1999.

periodicals

Herald (Glasgow, Scotland), January 15, 2003, p. 16.

Washington Post, January 11, 2003, p. B6.