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.
EU
and her husband led active social lives, often entertaining friends and colleagues at their home. Blanche Alethea Crackanthorpe
introduced her to Marie Belloc Lowndes
, who became a friend of Underhill and called her...
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...
Living in the north, DW
remained outside London literary circles. She found the company of councillors and their wives rather dispiriting and seem[ed] to have so much of it (because of her husband's job).
Whipple, Dorothy. Random Commentary. Michael Joseph.
40
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth Charles
Combe Edge soon became a noted centre of religous, philanthropic, and social activity.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia. Macmillan.
On her trips back to England EA
made some important new friends, including Maude Stanley
, a feminist interested in reforming London streetwalkers.
Usborne, Karen. "Elizabeth": The Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden. Bodley Head.
85
Stanley advised von Arnim extensively on her children's education and helped...
Friends, Associates
Katherine Mansfield
In the south of France KM
became quickly intimate in conversation with Marie Belloc Lowndes
, another writer twenty years her senior. A correspondence followed.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Editor Marques, Susan Lowndes, Chatto and Windus.
Following her early conquest of Tennyson
, AM
went on to develop a large circle of literary acquaintances. Callers on the Meynells at Palace Court included Irish writer Katharine Tynan
, Aubrey Beardsley
(while he...
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...
Friends, Associates
Violet Trefusis
The following year Lowndes
stayed with Trefusis at West Coker Manor.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Editor Marques, Susan Lowndes, Chatto and Windus.
273
At this time VT
nurtured her (often edgy) relationship with writer Nancy Mitford
, who moved from England to Paris in April...
Fictionalization
Alice Meynell
To many of her contemporaries (especially male contemporaries), AM
symbolised the perfection of Woman and Mother. Many descriptions of her suggest Woolf
's Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. Coventry Patmore
and Francis Thompson
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...