Mrs Alexander

23 June 1825 - 10 July 1902

Annie (French) Hector initially wrote anonymously. Later, not long before her husband died, she adapted his given name, Alexander, and wrote as Mrs Alexander.

Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.

Blain, Virginia, Patricia Clements, and Isobel Grundy, editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.

She published over forty-two novels over the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. Her writing supported herself and her family.

Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908.

Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.

Her fiction typically centres on a young girl torn between money, family and love.

Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.

She depicts a harsh world which offers no protection to defenceless females, but in which a woman of intelligence, courage, and energy can usually make her way. MA 's heroines emerge from isolation and loss of family to try to achieve love and marriage, which bring with them status and security through the dispensations of an eventually benevolent providence.

Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.

Milestones

23 June 1825

Annie French , who later wrote as Mrs Alexander, was born in Dublin.

Schlueter, Paul, and June Schlueter, editors. An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. Garland, 1988.

October 1854

The first work to be published by Annie French Hector (later MA ) was the anonymous novel Kate Vernon. A Tale (it was years later that she adopted her pseudonym).

Schlueter and Schlueter say that Agnes Waring was her first publication. In fact it appeared two years later as by the author of Kate Vernon.

Cox, Michael, editor. The Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Oxford University Press, 2002.

British Library Catalogue.

June 1872 to November 1873

MA 's best-known novel, The Wooing O't, titled from a song by Robert Burns , appeared in instalments in Temple Bar; in book form it appeared on 11 September 1873 under her new pseudonym.

In the song, Duncan Gray, Maggie resists the lovesick Duncan until he appears to lose interest, whereupon she in her turn falls in love and he magnanimously accepts her. MA takes as her title the narrator's repeated, amused comment on this courtship story.

Schlueter, Paul, and June Schlueter, editors. An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. Garland, 1988.

Cox, Michael, editor. The Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Oxford University Press, 2002.

June 1875-August 1876

MA 's novel Her Dearest Foe was serialized in Temple Bar: published in volume form in 1876 under her pseudonym, it is among the earliest detective stories (though not the earliest).

Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.

Smith, Muriel. “An Unnoticed Follower of Wilkie Collins”. Notes and Queries, No. 3, p. 326.

326

Houghton, Walter E., and Jean Harris Slingerland, editors. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals 1824-1900. University of Toronto Press, 1989.

10 July 1902

MA died at her home, 10 Warrington Gardens in Maida Vale, London.

Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

By early February 1904

MA 's final novel (posthumously published with a biographical note by Iza Duffus Hardy ) was Kitty Costello.

TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012].

108 (5 February 1904): 36

British Library Catalogue.

Biography

Early Years in Ireland

23 June 1825

Annie French , who later wrote as Mrs Alexander, was born in Dublin.

Schlueter, Paul, and June Schlueter, editors. An Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. Garland, 1988.