Taming The Vegan Tigress
by Claire Parker
The British Fantasy Society Journal
#26 Summer 2025

Mary De Morgan (1850 – 1907) was born in London and the youngest of seven children. She was a writer, a woman of independent means, a socialist and an activist. Her imagination was lively and unconventional. She wove social and feminist commentary through her subversive, unusual fairytales. Her life journey was not an easy one; she certainly didn’t opt for the path of least resistance and clearly wanted to change the world, choosing to be heard through her stories. As a playwright, I find Mary De Morgan’s life intriguing and began asking deeper questions about the nature of narrative; where do stories go when they’ve run their course? And ultimately do stories belong to us or we to them?

Mary De Morgan wrote three volumes of fairytales, the last being five years before she died, The Wind Fairies in 1900 (published by Seeley and Co. illustrated by Olive Cockerell), The Necklace of Princess Fiorimonde in 1880 (published by MacMillan & Co, illustrated by Walter Crane) with her first being On a Pincushion in 1877 (published by Seeley, Jackson & Halliday, illustrated by her brother William De Morgan).

Her first volume included ‘The Hair Tree,’ a fantastical and multi-layered tale in which, according to Shandi Lynne Wagner, ‘De Morgan communicates proto-feminist critiques of marriage as women’s destiny and violence against women in ‘The Hair Tree’ without being censored for her rebellious message.’ The tale contains some quite brutal feminine themes and Mary’s frustration and indignation is palpable. There is a story within a story of an unfortunate young woman called Trevina who, on refusing to marry a lascivious Tortoise King, is turned into a tigress by his outraged mother. She is banished and told never to eat flesh but only herbs or she will remain a starving tigress and the only way to regain her female form is by being beaten with a rod from the Hair Tree by a man until she bleeds. This is surely a question of survival for the tigress and clearly not a moral lesson in marital compliance since Trevina ends up happily married to the young sailor who has released her from the spell. The tigress could be seen as a metaphor for Mary who was never given permission to fully express and embody her own power as a woman or gain due respect in a man’s world. The Vegan Tigress, is a reimagining of the writer’s later years in a contextual setting. Her fairytale ‘The Hair Tree’ is woven through the play.

It is fun to imagine that Mary De Morgan’s bright intellect sowed seeds in the minds of her eminent male contemporaries whose names and legacies we do still remember. A friend of William Morris and his family, she helped embroider the bed hangings at Kelmscott Manor with May Morris and was at his bedside as he lay dying. Morris was, as we know, the deeply influential father of the Arts and Crafts movement and a passionate socialist, but he also wrote myths and fairytales, which Tolkien himself considered as having had an impact on his writing.

She grew up amongst artists and activists in a circle of free-thinking Pre-Raphaelites. Mary read her fairytales to the children of Burne-Jones, the Rossettis and to a young Rudyard Kipling amongst others. She had non-conformist parents who encouraged education for girls; her father was the respected mathematician, Augustus De Morgan, her brother was William De Morgan (tile designer and novelist who married Pre-Raphaelite painter Evelyn De Morgan nee Pickering), and her mother, Sophia, was a philanthropist, campaigneragainst slavery and for women’s suffrage and helped Elizabeth Fry to reform prisons. Sophia was also a spiritualist, avidly read Swedenborg, and as there was a keen fascination at that time with the supernatural realms, this seemed the ideal backdrop for the play.

Mary’s fictional antagonist is accidentally summoned in an ill-fated seance at the beginning of the play. She appears in the form of a tightly laced ghost, Lady Tuttle, who becomes trapped with the free-spirited Mary in her tiny and humble quarters. Earning a paltry income as a writer at a time when a woman was expected to marry and stay in her ‘sphere’, Mary clearly valued her freedom above all else. What might this highly offended Lady from Polite Society make of this bohemian thinker? Well, it turns out she already has a substantial bone to pick with Mary. I wanted to create a story that followed both the factual, stark reality of her situation and the dreamworld of her tales – a story that would allow the essence of Mary De Morgan to briefly breathe again.

Mary and her theatrical antagonist match in terms of a strong conviction of their own beliefs and there comes a reckoning whereby both parties have to face the other’s ideals and the consequences of their personal life choices. Both characters are products of their era and both suffer as women, albeit for very different reasons. I’ve placed Mary towards the end of her life and just before she leaves for Egypt in 1905 due to her declining health aged 55. She died there aged 57 of what her family referred to as the ‘De Morgan curse’, tuberculosis, after working for two years as a tutor in a girl’s reformatory school.

Mary’s contemporary reviewers failed to notice the powerful, sometimes brutal, feminist and social commentary running through her fairytales that they suggested were pretty, naive and simplistic. According to researcher and writer Marilyn Pemberton, ‘Mary de Morgan chose the fairy tale genre in order to exploit its utopian function and so to critique the society in which they lived.’ (2006)

My play shines a light on this quietly influential voice lost amongst her illustrious contemporaries and overwritten by the dominant narrative of the time. The play lets us glimpse at what meaning life may hold for us as it begins to draw to a close, looking playfully at life and death, love, memory, legacy and friendship. The formidable ghost from her past forces her to re-evaluate her own story as she finds herself on the cusp of a life-changing journey. The play not only serves to celebrate the life of this exceptional writer but also the magical art of storytelling that was so dear to her heart.

The 175th anniversary of Mary de Morgan’s birth was on 24th February 2025 and coincided with the two-week run of the play at The Bread and Roses Theatre in Clapham, London.

Works Cited

Carroll, A. (2010). The Greening of Mary De Morgan: The Cultivating Woman and the Ecological Imaginary in ‘The Seeds of Love’. Victorian Review, 36(2), 104–117. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41413856

De Morgan M. ed. (2011) Threescore Years and Ten: Reminiscences of the Late Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan. Cambridge Library Collection - Spiritualism and Esoteric Knowledge. Cambridge University Press; 2011:v-vi.

Pemberton M. (n.d.) Mary De Morgan, De Morgan Society https://www.demorgan.org.uk/mary-de-morgan-by-marilyn-pemberton/

Pemberton, M. (2006) Mary de Morgan: Out of the Morrisian Shadow. Postgraduate English Journal, Issue14. https://post-gradenglishjournal.awh.durham.ac.uk/ojs/index.php/pgenglish/article/view/62

Pemberton, M. (2019) Out of the Shadows: The Life and Works of Mary De Morgan. Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Tolkien Gateway. William Morris. Available from: https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/William_Morris#:~:text=Literary%20 works%20by%20Morris%2C%20which%20Tolkien%20explicitly,of%20Gunnlaug%20the%20Worm%2Dtongue%20(for%20Gr%C3%ADma%20Wormtongue)

Wagner, S.L. (2015) Sowing Seeds of Subversion. Wayne State University https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2171&context=oa_dissertations