Charlotte Despard, who wrote and published during almost sixty years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, began with romantic novels, then allowed her already existent interest in political issues to percolate into her fiction. From the time of the suffrage struggle she became an editor, a prolific journalist, and a pamphleteer. Some of her poetry reached print when she was in her nineties. Despite her great importance to the suffrage struggle and to Irish and other left-wing politics of her several generations, her diaries and letters remain unpublished.
Milestones
15 June 1844 Charlotte French (later CD) was born at
Ripple Vale in
Kent, where her family had an estate.

By 28 January 1874 CD published her first novel, the three-decker
Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow, which the
Feminist Companion calls "forceful though overwritten".

1884 CD's explicitly political short novel
A Voice from the Dim-Millions purported to be the true story of a 'Working-Woman', written by her and only edited by CD. It had a frontispiece by F. Barnard.
