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.
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.
In an interview in 1896, SG
made clear her belief in the need for female suffrage: We shall do no good until we get the Franchise, for however well-intentioned men may be, they cannot understand...
Reception
Cicely Hamilton
This novel was awarded the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse in early 1920.
Hamilton, Cicely. Life Errant. J. M. Dent and Sons.
157
The Times announcement of the award mentioned that it was worth £40 and that a committee (with Marie Belloc Lowndes
as president...
Friends, Associates
Mary Agnes Hamilton
MAH
knew and worked closely with the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald
, though her early intense admiration for him diminished with time. Up to the year after publishing her book on him (which was also...
Literary responses
Beatrice Harraden
Marie Belloc Lowndes
described this book for the Times Literary Supplement as a strangely poignant drama and likened it to Mary Shelley
's Frankenstein and Sir Walter Scott
's Waverley for its comparable ability to...
Family and Intimate relationships
Matilda Hays
Marie Belloc Lowndes
, daughter of Bessie Rayner Parkes
, recalled MH
as a tall, handsome woman with a strongly featured face, very clever, and with a great deal of charm, particularly for other women...
Family and Intimate relationships
John Oliver Hobbes
JOH
had a number of intimate relationships with men, including Lord Robert Crewe
and George Nathaniel Curzon
, whose name was linked with hers before his marriage in 1895, and again in the very few...
Family and Intimate relationships
Violet Hunt
Elsie Ford dropped her suit against the Daily Mirror when it paid her £350 in damages and published an apology.
Belford, Barbara. Violet. Simon and Schuster.
197
But despite the fact that Ford was never legally divorced or remarried, he and...
Literary responses
Violet Hunt
Sooner or Later received (perhaps excessively) high praise from a number of VH
's contemporaries. Marie Belloc Lowndes
(daughter of Bessie Rayner Parkes
) wrote in The Merry Wives of Westminster, 1946, that it...
Leisure and Society
Margaret Kennedy
She belonged to, among other literary clubs, the Liberal Book Club
and the 30 Club, which consisted of a group of women writers who met for lunch at the Ritz Grill. Other members...
Literary responses
Vernon Lee
Marie Belloc Lowndes
, who knew VL
fairly well, felt out of sympathy with her frightening erudition and off-putting snobbery—but she was indignant at Anatole France
's caricature of Lee in Le lys rouge.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Where Love and Friendship Dwelt. Macmillan.
177
Travel
Rose Macaulay
RM
went on a two-week tour of Sicily with friends in 1931. She spent several months researching in Portugal in 1943, visiting Lisbon and Oporto. In Portugal she visited the one of Marie Belloc Lowndes
