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.
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...
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...
Family and Intimate relationships
Julia Frankau
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.
The novel caused scandal both to Jewish readers, who judged it anti-semitic, and to gentile readers, who found its treatment of sex outside marriage too outspoken.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
According to Marie Belloc Lowndes
, Ernest Hart
tacitly...
Literary responses
Julia Frankau
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.
57
The Times obituary on JF
referred to this novel's brilliant portrait and caricature of...
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.
57
Textual Production
Julia Frankau
As usual for fiction, she published as Frank Danby. This novel's length (120,000 words) provoked Marie Belloc Lowndes
to joke about the episodes of jeopardy being recurrent. JF
feared in 1911 that Methuen
would...
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
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
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...
