Basil King - The Inner Shrine: The Bestseller of 1909

William Benjamin Basil King was born on February 26th, 1859, in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

After graduating from the University of King''s College in Nova Scotia, King served as an Anglican rector at St. Luke''s Pro-Cathedral in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and then Christ Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

After retiring from the clergy due to poor eyesight and a thyroid disease King took to writing. It was a very successful change of career and he achieved a number of best-selling works.

His fourth published work was ‘The Inner Shrine’ and was originally published anonymously. It became the best-selling book of 1909. It related the story of a French-Irish girl whose husband is killed in a duel.

His fascination with the spiritual world increased as he grew older and he wove it into the narratives of his novels. In ‘The Abolishing of Death’ (1919) King wrote about the transmission of messages from a deceased chemist. He moved closer to the parallels in his own life with ‘The Conquest of Fear’ (1921) which reflected his own struggle with ill health and his later spiritual growth, together with an explanation for his mystical approach to religious understanding.

Basil King died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on June 22, 1928.