E. A. Dillwyn

16 May 1845 - 13 December 1935

EAD published six novels between 1880 and 1892: these novels combine murders and melodrama with serious treatment of the need for social reform and of the intelligent woman's search for a meaningful place in society. She also wrote reviews for The Spectator. She abandoned writing when she inherited her father's debt-ridden spelter works factory in 1892 and embarked on a successful business career which made her briefly famous.

Milestones

16 May 1845

EAD was born at her family home, Parc or Park Wern, in Sketty near Swansea, Glamorgan.

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

By 2 October 1880

EAD published under her surname and initials, as if she were male, her first novel, The Rebecca Rioter, A Story of Killay Life.

Athenæum. J. Lection.

2762 (1880): 431-2

By November 1892

EAD published her final novel, Maggie Steele's Diary, designed for young people (although highly educated ones).

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.

13 December 1935

At the age of ninety-one, EAD died at home at Tŷ-Glyn in West Cross, on the coast south of Swansea.

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

Biography

Birth and Family

16 May 1845

EAD was born at her family home, Parc or Park Wern, in Sketty near Swansea, Glamorgan.

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