Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Marie Belloc Lowndes
-
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.
"Marie Belloc Lowndes, book jacket" Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumbhttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4b/Cover--The_chink_in_the_armour.jpg/653px-Cover--The_chink_in_the_armour.jpg/4/4b/Cover--The_chink_in_the_armour.jpg/653px-Cover--The_chink_in_the_armour.jpg.
Marie Belloc Lowndes
thought this a strange, powerful story, but liked it less than some of JF
's earlier work.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. The Merry Wives of Westminster. Macmillan, 1946.
57
The Times obituary on JF
referred to this novel's brilliant portrait and caricature of...
Literary responses
Gertrude Stein
GS
's writing has been ruffling critics since Laura Riding
wrote in 1927 of her literalism, simple-mindedness, and successful barbarism.
Hoffmann, Michael J. “Gertrude Stein in the Psychology Laboratory”. American Quarterly, Vol.
17
, No. 1, 1 Mar.–31 May 1965, pp. 127-32.
130
In 1945 Hugh Walpole
painted Stein as a self-adoring priestess of her own...
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...
Literary responses
Julia Frankau
Marie Belloc Lowndes
later wrote that Baccarat was thirty years ahead of its time, and had it been signed by Guy de Maupassant
it would have become and remained famous.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. The Merry Wives of Westminster. Macmillan, 1946.
57
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...
Literary responses
May Sinclair
While other friends had reservations, Anthony Deane
told MS
that this was the very best book he had read for a long time.
qtd. in
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press, 2000.
95
It received far better reviews in the USA than at home...
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...
Literary responses
May Sinclair
Marie Belloc Lowndes
wrote to tell MS
she thought this her best book so far, though Sinclair did not agree with her.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press, 2000.
166
Occupation
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon
At about this time she painted her finest water-colour, a large painting of the plain of Blidah in Algiers, showing honey-coloured sand, sparsely covered with grey olive trees, blue cacti, and alfa [sic]...
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...
Occupation
Lady Cynthia Asquith
She needed the money, since she and her husband (still in France) both had debts. She worked three or four days a week, whatever hours suited her (she was free, for instance, to take school...
politics
Sarah Grand
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...
Boll, Theophilus E. M. Miss May Sinclair: Novelist: A Biographical and Critical Introduction. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1973.
96
Sinclair, however, could not approve the increasingly...
Publishing
Evelyn Sharp
In March 1912 when Emmeline
and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence
were arrested, ES
became, almost at a moment's notice, acting editor (officially assistant editor) of Votes for Women, the official organ of the WSPU
. She...