Margaret Williamson King

Margaret Alice Houston Williamson was born in Scotland, the daughter of Protestant Christian missionaries Alexander Williamson and Isabelle Dougall Williamson.^[1] Her parents were from Scotland,^[2] and both of them wrote books about their experiences in China.^[3][4][5]

Books by King included two novels, Cousin Cinderella (1892)^[6] and Lord Goltho: An Apostle of Whiteness (1893). Books co-written with her husband appeared under the joint pen name "William A. Rivers", or crediting "Veronica and Paul King", and included Anglo-Chinese Sketches (1903),^[7] Eurasia: A Tale of Shanghai Life (1907),^[8] The Chartered Junk: A Tale of the Yangtze Valley (1910), Theodora's Stolen Family (1928), The Commissioner's Dilemma: An International Tale of the China of Yesterday (1929)^[9] and Looking Inwards (1931). She also published one of her father's journals with one of her own, as Voyaging to China in 1855 and 1904: A Contrast in Travel (1936).^[10] Madge King also wrote articles about China for British publications.^[11]

The Kings wrote about their travels in the United States in two critical volumes, The Raven on the Skyscraper: A Study of Modern American Portents (1925) and Under the Eagle's Feathers (1926).^[12][13][14]

Margaret Williamson (known to her family as 'Veronica') married Paul Henry King (1853–1938), a Commissioner in the Chinese Maritime Customs Service, at Shanghai's Holy Trinity Cathedral in 1881.^[15] They had five sons, Duncan, Paul, Wilfrid, Louis, and Patrick, and two daughters, Dulcie and Carol.^[16] Their fourth son Louis Magrath King (1886–1949) married a Tibetan woman, Rinchen Lhamo, and they continued the family tradition of writing about China and Tibet.^{[5][17][18][19]} Margaret Williamson King died in England in 1949, aged 88 years.^[2]