Edith Lyttelton

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Edith Lyttelton's prominent position in society helped to draw attention to her first and best-known play, Warp and Woof, 1904, which took up the issue of sweated labour. Her dramatic oeuvre includes several morality plays, a genre she actively promoted through the Morality Play Society . She produced a single novel. Her non-fiction traces her evolving personal and political interests: she produced a biography of her husband (the politician Alfred Lyttelton ), a report for the League of Nations , several treatises on parapsychology, and an account of her travels in India and the Far East, in which she defends British colonialism.
  • BirthName: Edith Sophy Balfour
  • Nicknames: D. D.
    Mrs Patrick Campbell knew EL as D. D. Lyttelton
    ; Mrs King
  • Married: Lyttelton
    This Edith Sophy Balfour Lyttelton should not be confused with the New Zealand novelist Edith J. Lyttleton (1873-1945), who wrote under the name G. B. Lancaster.
    ; The Hon. Mrs. Alfred Lyttelton
  • Pseudonym: Edith Hamlet
Black and white photograph of Edith Lyttelton, wearing a dark velvet dress with a fur trimmed collar and sleeves, with buttons on the shoulders. She is wearing a choker necklace with a black ribbon, and she has a bow in her light hair, which is pulled back. She has an elbow propped on a table and her head rests on that hand.

Milestones

Probably 1865

Edith Sophy Balfour (later EL ) was born a British subject at St Petersburg in Russia, where her father did business.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says 1865, the 1881 census, by deduction from her current age of fifteen, says 1866.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

1896

EL published her first and only novel, The Touch of Sorrow: A Study, under the pseudonym Edith Hamlet.
OCLC WorldCat. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.

6 June 1904

Large crowds gathered at the Camden Theatre for the opening of EL 's first play, Warp and Woof: A Drama in Three Acts, which took up the issue of sweated labour in the dressmaking industry.
Nicoll, Allardyce. English Drama, 1900-1930. Cambridge University Press, 1973.
797
Kaplan, Joel H., and Sheila Stowell. Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes. Cambridge University Press, 1994.
91

March 1917

EL published Alfred Lyttelton : An Account of His Life, a biography of her husband which foregrounds his political career.
Lyttelton, Edith. Alfred Lyttelton: An Account of His Life. Longmans, Green, 1917.
prelims

1937

EL 's study of telepathy, Some Cases of Prediction: A Study, was published.
OCLC WorldCat. 1992–1998, http://www.oclc.org/firstsearch/content/worldcat/. Accessed 1999.

2 September 1948

EL died at her home, 18 Great College Street, Westminster, London, at the age of eighty-three.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

Biography

Birth and Family

Probably 1865

Edith Sophy Balfour (later EL ) was born a British subject at St Petersburg in Russia, where her father did business.
The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography says 1865, the 1881 census, by deduction from her current age of fifteen, says 1866.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.

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