Greville Texidor
novelist and short-story writer
Margaret Greville Foster (1902 — 20 August 1964), best known by her pen name Greville Texidor, was an English fiction writer, notable for her work written while living in New Zealand from 1940 to 1948.
After traveling the world as a performer and fighting alongside her husband for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, Texidor went into exile in New Zealand with her family during the early years of World War II, pushed out of England due to her husband's German background and the couple's radical politics.
In New Zealand, she began writing fiction and joined Auckland's literary community. Her short stories and novellas, compiled posthumously in the collection In Fifteen Minutes You Can Say a Lot: Selected Fiction, are considered an important contribution to the existentialist period in New Zealand's literary canon.
Early life
Greville Texidor was born Margaret Greville Foster in 1902 in Wolverhampton, England.
After her father, William Arthur Foster, took his own life in 1919 amid a legal scandal, Margaret dropped out of school and moved to London to join the art world in Hampstead. She was joined by her mother, Editha Greville Prideaux Foster, and sister, Kate, who were both painters.
London life and world travel
In London, she began to work as a model and actress. In 1924, she appeared in the silent film Moonbeam Magic, playing the role of Miriam and credited as Margot Greville. She then toured Europe and the Americas as a chorus girl, picking up a contortionist boyfriend along the way.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q20812923. VIAF identifies the subject as 278443611. The Library of Congress control number is n88075353. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1902, 1964, 1940 and 1948.
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This entry incorporates text from “Greville Texidor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.