Charlotte Despard

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CD , who wrote and published during almost sixty years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, began with romantic novels, then allowed her already existent interest in political issues to percolate into her fiction. From the time of the suffrage struggle she became an editor, a prolific journalist, and a pamphleteer. Some of her poetry reached print when she was in her nineties. Despite her great importance to the suffrage struggle and to Irish and other left-wing politics of her several generations, her diaries and letters remain unpublished.

Milestones

15 June 1844

Charlotte French (later CD ) was born at Ripple Vale in Kent, where her family had an estate.
Linklater, Andro. An Unhusbanded Life. Hutchinson.
21

By 28 January 1874

CD published her first novel, the three-decker Chaste as Ice, Pure as Snow, which the Feminist Companion calls forceful though overwritten.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2418 (1874): 290
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.
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.

1884

CD 's explicitly political short novel A Voice from the Dim-Millions purported to be the true story of a Working-Woman, written by her and only edited by CD . It had a frontispiece by F. Barnard .
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.

10 November 1939

CD died at ninety-five, bankrupt, in hospital after a fall at her home, Nead na Gaoithe in Whitehead near Belfast.
Mulvihill, Margaret. Charlotte Despard: A Biography. Pandora.
200

Biography

Birth and Influences

15 June 1844

Charlotte French (later CD ) was born at Ripple Vale in Kent, where her family had an estate.
Linklater, Andro. An Unhusbanded Life. Hutchinson.
21