Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Marie Belloc Lowndes
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Standard Name: Lowndes, Marie Belloc
Birth Name: Marie Adelaide Elizabeth Renée Julia Belloc
Nickname: Mary
Married Name: Marie Adelaide Elizabeth Renée Julia Lowndes
Indexed Name: Mrs Belloc Lowndes
Pseudonym: Philip Curtin
Pseudonym: Elizabeth Rayner
During a career that spanned nearly fifty years from 1889, MBL
published journalism, biography, a guidebook, history for children, novels (mostly romances or thrillers), a book about actual crimes, and four late volumes of autobiography. Her books of crime and detection were her most successful. Her list of titles numbers more than seventy.
EC
was offered £40 by Andrew Cameron
, editor of the Scottish magazine Family Treasury, to write on Martin Luther
. When her work was published as a historical novel, its unexpected success taught...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Charles
Although she made little money, EC
made a name for herself with the Chronicles. The novel went through several editions, as well as being translated into many European languages, Arabic, and numerous Indian dialects...
Leisure and Society
Mary Cholmondeley
MC
founded a weekly luncheon club for women writers called the Give and Take
. Marie Belloc Lowndes
was an early member. The price of lunch was two shillings and sixpence, and the club outlived...
Textual Production
Agatha Christie
AC
published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a detective novel which pioneered the device whereby the narrator turns out to be the murderer.
Others, like Marie Belloc Lowndes
, had used a murderer's narrative...
Intertextuality and Influence
Agatha Christie
Captain Hastings, an ambitious detective, narrates an ingenious plot by a pair of criminals to stage their arrest and acquittal, only to have Poirot solve and reveal their actual crime. Poirot is described as an...
Reception
Agatha Christie
While AC
said that the idea for Hercule Poirot came to her out of the blue and was modelled on Belgian refugees she had observed in her home parish during the First World War, journalist...
On the basis of this piece, Marie Belloc Lowndes
felt in 1946 that if the circumstances of Cornish's life had been different she too might have become a famous writer.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. The Merry Wives of Westminster. Macmillan.
36
Occupation
Elizabeth De la Pasture
Marie Belloc Lowndes
(who calls her Lady Clifford) writes that EDP
spoke interestingly, in October 1925, about her experiences visiting public institutions in Ceylon. The local authorities arranged to omit the lunatic asylums...
Literary responses
E. M. Delafield
Marie Belloc Lowndes
, a Roman Catholic, observed in late 1945 that EMD
's early anti-Catholic suffered from a failure of realism, being filled with fantastic imaginary figures of the old Catholic world.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Editor Marques, Susan Lowndes, Chatto and Windus.
Lowndes, Diaries 267
Textual Production
Ella Hepworth Dixon
She was offered this position by F. V. White
on the strength of her novel The Story of a Modern Woman. As an editor she was following in the footsteps of her celebrated father
JF
's younger sister Eliza, later Aria
, also became a writer; more than Julia, she needed to support herself. She was a journalist, brilliant and witty, the founder of the school of gay flippant...
Travel
Julia Frankau
After her husband's death she and Marie Belloc Lowndes
visited Paris, where she diverted her intense sorrow by visiting, in the deepest mourning, shady nightclubs and the shops of print-sellers.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. The Merry Wives of Westminster. Macmillan.