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.
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. Fredeman, William E.Editor , Garland, 1986.
385
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.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908.
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.
Cox, Michael, editor. The Oxford Chronology of English Literature. Oxford University Press, 2002.
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, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

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. Fredeman, William E.Editor , Garland, 1986.
385
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.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908.

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