Emily Beatrix Coursolles Jones (15 April 1893 – 30 June 1966) was a British writer (pen-name "E. B. C. Jones") whose novels focused on the social and psychological traumas of World War I, on large-family dynamics among young adult siblings, and on relationships among the "liberated" middle-class intelligentsia of the Twenties.
She was also known in the interwar period as a reviewer of contemporary fiction in British literary journals, notably in The Adelphi.A few poems and reviews in the 1920s were signed "E. B. C. Lucas", her married name.
Life Emily Beatrix Coursolles Jones (known as "Topsy" to her friends) was born on 15 April 1893 in London. She was the youngest of eight children of Major Charles Jones (1840–1896) of the Royal Artillery and Mary Jane Ross (1855–1936).The Jones family tree for the eight siblings appears in Lucy Pollard's Margery Spring Rice: Pioneer of Women's Health in the Early twentieth Century (2020), p.xvii. She was educated for a time in Paris, where she got to know historian Eileen Power, a university friend (at Girton College, Cambridge) of her older sister Margaret ("Puppy") Jones (who was at Newnham)archivesearch.lib.cam.ac.uk, "Topsy" Jones – but unlike her sister, she did not go on to college. Five of the six Jones sisters, including Topsy, appeared, "thinly disguised", in a 1919 novel by another Girton graduate, Romer Wilson, If All These Young Men. (Three of the sisters had given 'suffragist' as their occupation on the 1911 census form.) Their brother Edward (b.1878), husband of social reformer Margery Spring Rice, was killed in July 1916 in the Battle of the Somme.Pollard, Lucy, Margery Spring Rice: Pioneer of Women's Health in the Early twentieth Century; Openbook Publishing, 2020
Jones's first book was a volume of poetry, Windows (1917). The following year, she edited an anthology of recent poetry, Songs for Sale, which one critic found to be generally unadventurous and too indebted to Britain's poet laureate, Robert Bridges, although one of Jones's own poems was singled out as a happy exception. Jerked heartstrings in town
I have heard echoes and seen visions of you Often of late. Once yawning at a play A sad keen rapture suddenly pierced me through Because one puppet moved and sighed your way;
An omnibus-conductor fixed your glance – Intense, preoccupied – upon my fare; I saw your stooping shoulders, at a dance, Lean by a doorway: but you were not there.
Down Oxford Street, in the slow shopping crowd, Hearing your very voice, "Ah, that's superb" I turned, – a tawdry simpering little dowd Passed by, and left me trembling on the kerb.E. B. C. Jones, ed., Songs for Sale: an anthology of recent poetry (London, 1918), p.27 [by E. B. C. Jones; from Songs for Sale (1918)] Jones's first novel, Quiet Interior, was published in 1920 and praised by such notable contemporary authors as Katherine Mansfield and Rebecca West. She went on to write a handful of others: The Singing Captives (1921), The Wedgwood Medallion (1923), Inigo Sandys (1924), Helen and Felicia (1927), and Morning and Cloud (1932). Although they were generally well received, they have fallen into obscurity in the years since. The New York Bookman reviewer John Macy thought her nom de plume too unmemorable for lasting fame: "Why does she not assume one that will instantly identify her in contemporaneous memory?" he asked in 1928.John Macy, 'Women are Witches', in The Bookman (New York), 1928, Vol.6, Issue 4, p.431
Jones moved in Cambridge and London literary circles, associating with the Bloomsbury GroupNicolson, Nigel, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 3., 1923–1928 (London, 1977).Bell, Anne, ed., The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2, 1920–24 (London 1980) and Vol. 3, 1925–30 (London 1981).Levy, Paul, ed., The Letters of Lytton Strachey (London, 2005). (Virginia Woolf admired "her spruce shining mind"Bell, Anne, ed., The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 2, p. 156.) and corresponding with writers Dorothy Richardson, Lytton Strachey,Holroyd, Michael, Lytton Strachey: A Critical Biography, Vol.2 (London, 1968) and Steven Runciman,Dinshaw, Minoo, Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman (London, 2016) among others. She reviewed modern fiction and biography for The Nation and Athenaeum,Review by Jones of T. F. Powys book, The Nation and Athenaeum, 16 June 1923, Vol. 33, Issue 11, p. 369 The Adelphi, the New Statesman, and The Cambridge Review in the 1920s and '30s,The Adelphi (London), September 1933; The Cambridge Review, 2 March 1928. crime fiction for The Spectator, and novels by such writers as Mary Butts for other publications.
Outside fiction, Jones stated her intellectual and religious outlook in her contribution to 'The Adelphi Forum: Religion and The Adelphi ' (July 1931): "One of the delights of existence is to perceive in widely dissimilar minds and writings the knowledge that human development is going and must go from selfhood to disinterested love - in Freud, for instance, or in W. B. Yeats, Fredegond Shove, Edwin Muir... I myself do not believe in God; where Mr Plowman speaks of the knowledge and love of the will of God, I should speak of the pure perception (here synonymous with love) of reality."'God, Faith, and Mr. Murry'; The Adelphi, Volume 2, No.4, July 1931, pages 285-6
From 1921 to 1929 Jones was married to F. L. ("Peter") Lucas, a classical scholar and literary critic who taught at Cambridge University. Jones was living at the time with her sister Petica, wife of classical scholar Donald Robertson, Lucas's former supervisor at Trinity College. Lucas had fallen in love with her after reading and admiring her first novel, Quiet Interior. Jones based the characters Hugh Sexton in The Singing Captives (1921) (a friend recovering from gassing in the War), and Oliver in The Wedgwood Medallion (1923) (a classics graduate now studying the Elizabethan drama) on Lucas, and dedicated two novels to him. In turn, Lucas's semi-autobiographical first novel, The River Flows (1926), includes a character based on Jones, the novelist Margaret Osborne. They were married for eight years,"Topsy is charming and in very good spirits and Peter in very good spirits and charming." – Carrington to Strachey from the Lucas' house in Cambridge in 1928. (Chisolm, Anne, Carrington's Letters: her art, her loves, her friendships, London 2017; letter of 16 January.) her 'salon' in West Road, Cambridge, being described by John Lehmann, who visited it as a student, as 'Bloomsbury-by-the-Cam'.Lehmann, John, The Whispering Gallery: Autobiography I (London, 1955), p.138–9Chainey, Graham, A Literary History of Cambridge (Pevensey, Cambridge, 1985), p.210 Her admiration for George RylandsA photograph of Topsy Lucas and Dadie Rylands at Tockington, Gloucestershire (where Rylands grew up), in spring 1928, appears in Simon Goldhill's Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History (Cambridge, 2025), p.175 undermined the marriage by the later 1920s.Annan, Noel, The Dons (London, 1999), p. 180.Jones, Peter, "Carrington (and Woolf) in Cambridge, 1928", Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, Vol. XIII Pt. 3, 2006, pp. 301–327.Garnett, David, ed., Carrington: Letters and Extracts from Her Diaries (London, 1970), p.392, p.437 Noel Annan stated that she was "an important influence" on Rylands' intellectual development. She retained her married name after 1929.Emily Beatrix Coursolles Lucas, correspondence with Leonard Woolf, 1950, Modernist Archives; modernistarchives.com Her partner from 1930 to the end of her life was the lawyer Donald Livingstone McIntyre (1905–1981),"E. B. C. Jones", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, p. 484. who was a prisoner of the Japanese during the Second World War. Her sister Petica was killed while on air-raid warden duty on 24 February 1941, the only civilian casualty in Cambridge of German bombing."Donald Struan Robertson", trinitycollegechapel.com//about/memorials/brasses/robertson-ds/
Jones died of a stroke on 30 June 1966. She left an unpublished (2025) memoir.Pollard, Lucy, Margery Spring Rice: Pioneer of Women's Health in the Early twentieth Century; Openbook Publishing, 2020; note to p.31
Publications
Novels Quiet Interior, London (Richard Cobden-Sanderson), 1920; New York (Boni & Liveright), 1926 The Singing Captives, London (Richard Cobden-Sanderson) 1921; New York (Boni & Liveright), 1922The dust jacket of the first American edition (1922) carries a portrait photograph of Jones. The Wedgwood Medallion, London (Chatto & Windus), 1922; New York (Henry Holt and Company), 1923 Inigo Sandys, London (Chatto & Windus) & New York (Henry Holt and Company), 1924 Helen and Felicia, London (Chatto & Windus) 1927; New York (Henry Holt and Company), 1928 Morning and Cloud, London (Victor Gollancz), 1932
Short stories 'The Bathe' (The Nation and Athenaeum, 10 December 1927The Nation and Athenaeum, Volume 42, Issue 10; 10 December 1927, pp. 391–393.)
Poetry Windows, verse by Christopher Johnson and E.B.C. Jones (Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1917)Seven poems by Jones, and five translations by Jones of poems by Albert Victor Samain.
Anthology Songs for Sale : an anthology of recent poetry, ed. E.B.C. Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 1918)Includes poems by the Sitwells, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Aldous Huxley, and three by Jones.
Criticism 'E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf', essay in The English Novelists; a survey of the novel by twenty contemporary novelists, ed. Derek Verschoyle (London: Chatto & Windus, 1936)
The novels Jones's novels deal with World War I, its immediate aftermath, and its effects on Britain's educated classes, exploring relationships among the young in the changed wartime and post-war worlds. Quiet Interior is set during the War, the plot revolving around the relationship between two sisters, Claire and Pauline Norris, and their romantic entanglement with a man named Clement. The Singing Captives is set in 1920 and examines the War's destructive consequences for a well-to-do family. The Wedgwood Medallion moves on from the War, focusing on an engaged couple who discover their incompatibility, triggering events that draw in their families and friends. Inigo Sandys begins in Cambridge University after the War, where the eponymous protagonist struggles with the first of three doomed relationships. Several characters from Quiet Interior reappear in this novel. Helen and Felicia and Morning and Cloud examine love and marriage among the cultivated middle-class young in the later Twenties. All six novels, to some degree, explore compatibility and incompatibility – Jones's central theme.
Quiet Interior (1920) "Clement reminds me a little," Hilary presently went on, in a voice as nearly approaching the softly reminiscent as she could attain, "of such a nice man I knew in Simla: a Captain Everard. He made love in the dearest way – I could hardly bear to refuse him. He had the same way of looking at me as though I was a revelation from heaven as Clement has of looking at you. And he was so shy and charmingly awkward about it all, like a great schoolboy, only not horribly clumsy, you know. They make the very nicest kinds of husbands, that sort."
"Why didn't you marry him?"
"My dear child, he hadn't a sou. And anyway I wasn't prepared to live in India for the rest of my life. Of course, I was very young then, but still, I knew it wouldn't do. I dare say if he'd been in Clement's position I should have succumbed," she added gaily. – From Chapter XVIII of Quiet Interior (1920)Jones, Quiet Interior, 1920, p. 239