Edna Lyall

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A highly popular writer, EL published eighteen novels or novellas between 1879 and 1902, as well as a play, an account of her childhood which she designed for young readers, and shorter pieces. Several of her novels are historical, some take up contemporary political isues. Though her plots are melodramatic, her people often verging on caricature, and her appetite for virtuous self-sacrifice immense, she is interestingly radical in her political sympathies and unconventional in her habit of choosing outsiders like foreigners, non-Christians, or activists, for her exemplary characters. She remained a byword for big sales, if not for artistry, past the mid twentieth century.
Black and white photograph of Edna Lyall by the firm of G. P. Abraham of Keswick. She is shown from the shoulders up, wearing a black and white feather boa over a dress which apparently has a white and black pattern on the body and stripes on the sleeves, She has dark, wavy hair.

Milestones

25 March 1857

Ada Ellen Bayly (who later wrote as EL ) was born at 5 Montpelier Villas, Brighton, the youngest of her family.
Escreet, J. M. The Life of Edna Lyall. Longmans, Green and Co.
3
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

By late April 1884

EL 's third novel, We Two, went further than Donovan in treating both politics and religion (and implicitly the controversial career of Charles Bradlaugh ). It was enormously successful: the breakthrough in her career.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
2948 (1884): 533
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.

Autumn 1894

In DoreenEL produced a novel which, unusually for an English author, anatomises the injustices of English rule in Ireland.
Escreet, J. M. The Life of Edna Lyall. Longmans, Green and Co.
131
Payne, George A. "Edna Lyall:" an Appreciation. John Heywood.
50

October 1902

EL published The Burges Letters: A Record of Child Life in the Sixties, an autobiography of her early years designed for child readers (with illustrations on the cover and inside).
Payne, George A. "Edna Lyall:" an Appreciation. John Heywood.
66
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.

8 February 1903

EL died at her home in College Road, Eastbourne, of malaria picked up first in Italy about five years earlier.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Payne, George A. "Edna Lyall:" an Appreciation. John Heywood.
73

Biography

Birth and Family

25 March 1857

Ada Ellen Bayly (who later wrote as EL ) was born at 5 Montpelier Villas, Brighton, the youngest of her family.
Escreet, J. M. The Life of Edna Lyall. Longmans, Green and Co.
3
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

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