Matilda Betham-Edwards

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Over the course of a career spanning the later nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth, MBE maintained a phenomenally high publishing output and covered most viable genres. She was best known for her novels and her travel-books about France, but she also wrote poetry and children's books, and edited and introduced the works of others. As a travel writer she is unusually sensitive to the conditions of peasant life on the land; as a novelist she draws heavily on actual experience, whether lived or observed.
  • BirthName: Matilda Barbara Edwards
  • Self-constructed: Betham-Edwards
    She chose to hyphenate her mother's birth-name with her own partly because of its literary associations: that is primarily as a tribute to her aunt Mary Matilda Betham . She published with her first initial more frequently than with her full first name.
    ; M. Betham-Edwards
  • Pseudonym: M. B. E.
Oval photograph of Matilda Betham-Edwards, c. 1893, looking straight forward with a dreamy smile. She is wearing a high collared dress with a pendant cross, and her hair, grey in front, is arranged tightly on top of her head. Her signature is reproduced below: "Yours truly, M. Betham-Edwards".

Milestones

4 March 1836

Matilda Barbara Edwards (later MBE ) was born at Westerfield Hall, near Ipswich, Suffolk, the fourth daughter among six brothers and sisters.
Miles, Alfred H. The Victorian Poets: The Bio-Critical Introductions to the Victorian Poets from A. H. Miles’s The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century. Editor Fredeman, William E., Garland, 1986.
385
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2025, 22 vols. plus supplements.

1857

MBE published The White House by the Sea, A Love Story, in two handsome volumes, as she later put it herself.
Betham-Edwards, Matilda. Reminiscences. G. Redway, 1898, p. vi, 354 pp.
141

By 6 March 1869

MBE published her romanticnovelKitty, which Helen C. Black ranked as her most popular.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2158 (1869): 337
Black, Helen C. Notable Women Authors of the Day. D. Bryce, 1893.
125

1919

Two works by MBE appeared posthumously: the translated anthology French Fireside Poetry, edited by Bernard Miall , and Mid-Victorian Memories, with a biographical sketch by Sarah Grand .
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Cox, Michael, editor. The Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Oxford University Press, 2002, 2 vols.
1: 617

4 January 1919

MBE died in her eighties, following a stroke, at her home Villa Julia, High Wickham, near Hastings in Sussex.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Biography

Birth and Background

4 March 1836

Matilda Barbara Edwards (later MBE ) was born at Westerfield Hall, near Ipswich, Suffolk, the fourth daughter among six brothers and sisters.
Miles, Alfred H. The Victorian Poets: The Bio-Critical Introductions to the Victorian Poets from A. H. Miles’s The Poets and the Poetry of the Nineteenth Century. Editor Fredeman, William E., Garland, 1986.
385
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908–2025, 22 vols. plus supplements.

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