Harriet Smythies

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Standard Name: Smythies, Harriet
Birth Name: Harriet Maria Gordon
Married Name: Harriet Maria Smythies
Self-constructed Name: Mrs. Yorick Smythies
Self-constructed Name: Mrs. Gordon Smythies
Nickname: Queen of the Domestic Novel
HS launched a forty-five-year career in 1835 with a romantic, historical, narrative poem. Her later poems, all of substantial length, deal with contemporary public events. She set her name to these (after the first) but not for many years to her fiction, which until then she published allusively. Her more than twenty novels begin, like her poetry, with stories of the vicissitudes of courtship, in which at least some of the central lovers need moral improvement or reform before their happy ending. Her later novels become more complex and accomplished in their social satire but the love stories (now lighter in touch) remain dominant.

Connections

Connections Author name Sort descending Excerpt
Textual Production Caroline Frances Cornwallis
This book came out of CFC 's long held sentiment that the current treatment of children needed to be corrected.
Cornwallis, Caroline Frances. Selections from the Letters of Caroline Frances Cornwallis. Editor Power, M. C., Trübner and Co.
202, 204-5
The Ragged School Union had been founded in 1844 to promote education for...
Family and Intimate relationships Susan Smythies
Of Susan's identified siblings (apart from those who died young) William was born in November 1722, Humphrey or Humphry in January 1724, Ann in February 1725, Elizabeth in August 1727; from the first marriage there...

Timeline

1838: Miss Gordon in A Guide to the Genealogical...

Women writers item

1838

Miss Gordon in A Guide to the Genealogical Chart of English and Scottish History, published this year, set out to prove Queen Victoria 's Scottish ancestry.

September 1854: The British landed in Crimea, unopposed by...

National or international item

September 1854

The British landed in Crimea, unopposed by the Russians they had come to make war with. They went on to lay siege to Sebastopol that October and to win important victories at Balaklava (25...

April 1863: Henry Mansel in the Quarterly Review attacked...

Writing climate item

April 1863

Henry Mansel in the Quarterly Review attacked sensation novels as preaching to the nerves and as indications of a wide-spread corruption, of which they are in part both the effect and the cause; called into...

Texts

Smythies, Harriet. A Faithful Woman. Hurst and Blackett, 1865.
Smythies, Harriet. A Warning to Wives. 1847.
Smythies, Harriet. Acquitted. Tinsley, 1870.
Hook, Theodore, and Harriet Smythies. “Advertisement”. Cousin Geoffrey, edited by Theodore Hook and Theodore Hook, Richard Bentley, 1840.
Smythies, Harriet. Cousin Geoffrey. Editor Hook, Theodore, Richard Bentley, 1840.
Smythies, Harriet. Cousin Geoffrey. Editor Hook, Theodore, Routledge, 1859.
Smythies, Harriet. Eva’s Fortunes. 1875.
Smythies, Harriet. Fitzherbert. 1838.
Smythies, Harriet. Idols of Clay. Saunders, Otley, 1867.
Smythies, Harriet. Incurable!. Petter and Galpin, 1863.
Smythies, Harriet. Left to Themselves. Hurst and Blackett, 1863.
Smythies, Harriet. Our Mary. J. and R. Maxwell, 1880.
Smythies, Harriet. Sebastopol. 1854.
Smythies, Harriet. The Breach of Promise. T. C. Newby, 1845.
Smythies, Harriet. The Bride of Siena. Saunders and Otley, 1835.
Smythies, Harriet. The Jilt. R. Bentley, 1844.
Smythies, Harriet. The Life of a Beauty. 1846.
Smythies, Harriet. The Marrying Man. R. Bentley, 1841.
Smythies, Harriet. The Matchmaker. Colburn, 1842.
Smythies, Harriet. The Prince and the People. 1854.
Smythies, Harriet. True to the Last. Hurst and Blackett, 1862.