Roberta Murphy (1941-2024) was the best short story writer that you’ve never heard of. Robbie was the one who taught me that real writers write because they must. She was driven to do it, in the same way that the rest of us are driven to eat, exercise or read books. Murphy, who was born in a small Welsh town, was filling diaries and scrapbooks with words by the time she was six years old. She was still writing at age 80, when cancer, the heartless demon of American life, snatched her away from those who loved her.
I knew Robbie for 30 years and some of the best moments of my life just happened around her Thanksgiving table. She was a petite woman, but only the physical frame that God gave her was small. Her imagination and sense of possibility were as vast as the ocean. Her ideas and stories were shaped by her experiences as a rootless cosmopolitan in London, India, and eventually in Northern Virginia. As a woman of flinty, Old World integrity, she never cared about money or fame at all.
As a young woman, Robbie studied with John Irving at George Mason University. It was through her connection with him that one of her first important stories appeared in The Best American Short Stories of 1982. Eventually, she published two novels, The Enchanted (1989), a Welsh ghost story that is impossible to forget. Later, there was Night Players (1991), an erotic thriller set in London in the last carefree years before World War I. Both of Robbie’s novels can be found on Amazon.com.
When a famous writer publishes a new book, it is both an event and a sure thing. For a talented, but relatively unknown writer like Robbie, every card in the deck must fall correctly for her to enjoy the kind of success that some of her colleagues now take for granted. It didn’t happen. Those novels, which might have brought pleasure and entertainment to so many, never received the kind of marketing and public relations support that they needed to find a large audience.
While she was probably disappointed, her British soul could never abide self-pity. She was also much too busy to dwell on the past (except in her work). She went on to publish compelling and thoughtful short stories in some of the best literary and “little” magazines in America. A brief list includes The Georgia Review, Other Voices, The Harvard Review, Nimrod, The Baltimore Review, and others. One of her later stories focused on the relationship between a man and his horse. As a daughter of an urban world, Robbie never owned a horse and probably never rode one either. However, she was a dedicated researcher----and if she didn’t know something, you can bet that she would find out.
I told the truth when I said earlier that Robbie Murphy never cared a fig for fame! However, since her recent death, Robbie’s friends have begun to focus on a problem on the other end of the scale. For us, the friends she left behind, are worried that both this remarkable woman and her life’s work will be forgotten! I can’t bear the idea of it, so please help us - the small community of Robbie’s friends - to keep both her work and legacy alive. You probably won’t find her two novels in your local library though they are available from Amazon.com. Friends are working on bringing her best stories to the attention of commercial publishers. However, progress on this issue may be years away, so the kindest thing you could do for her and for us is to spread the word.
Dick Levinson has lived in Philadelphia since 1995. He is a frequent contributor to The Village View, the monthly Penn’s Village newsletter. He is a librarian at the Parkway Central Library.
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