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.
After Mansfield's death, Woolf
wrote in her diary: it seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won't read it.
Gunn, Kirsty. “How the Laundry Basket Squeaked”. London Review of Books, Vol.
35
, No. 7, pp. 25-6.
25
KM
appears in episodes in more than one novel by her friend...
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
Margaret Oliphant
The work has been consistently admired. On its appearance the editor of The Spectator praised it for wonderful mastery of the borderland of the natural and the supernatural,
Greenfield, John R., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 159. Gale Research.
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
Literary responses
Evelyn Underhill
Marie Belloc Lowndes
thought this novel and The Grey World had a quality of poetical beauty no writer has since attained. She deplored a later slighting reference to these novels, and liked them better than...
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
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...
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...
Leisure and Society
Violet Trefusis
Marie Belloc Lowndes
recorded in 1945 that VT
looked and dressed as if she was twenty-eight, was a fascinating talker who liked to hold the floor, and had wonderful joie de vivre.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Editor Marques, Susan Lowndes, Chatto and Windus.
264
Intertextuality and Influence
Lady Cynthia Asquith
LCA
's first published writing, an article entitled How to sit for your portrait, appeared in the Times; she had written it at the suggestion of Marie Belloc Lowndes
, who admired her...
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...
Friends, Associates
Rhoda Broughton
RB
's vitality, sincerity, and pungent wit gained her the friendship of some of the most notable people of her day.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
Her wide circle of friends and acquaintances included Henry James
(the two became extremely...
Friends, Associates
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR
wrote to Charlotte Yonge
a few years later, lamenting: oh! what a pity it is that we are all growing old who have had such happy happy times with one another.
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters. Editors Bloom, Abigail Burnham and John Maynard, Ohio State University Press.
242
She uttered...
Friends, Associates
Rhoda Broughton
There her near-salon was attended by men and women belonging to every stratum of political, literary, and artistic society.
Times. Times Publishing Company.
(7 June 1920): 17
To the great regret of Marie Belloc Lowndes
, Broughton in the...
