Harriet Smythies

-
HS launched a forty-five-year career in 1835 with a romantic, historical, narrative poem. Her later poems, all of substantial length, deal with contemporary public events. She set her name to these (after the first) but not for many years to her fiction, which until then she published allusively. Her more than twenty novels begin, like her poetry, with stories of the vicissitudes of courtship, in which at least some of the central lovers need moral improvement or reform before their happy ending. Her later novels become more complex and accomplished in their social satire but the love stories (now lighter in touch) remain dominant.
  • BirthName: Harriet Maria Gordon
    Both Allibone and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography spell her first name Harriette.

  • Nickname: Queen of the Domestic Novel
    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, 1990.

  • Self-constructed: Mrs Yorick Smythies
    Kirk, John Foster, and S. Austin Allibone, editors. A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors. J. B. Lippincott, 1891, 2 vols.
    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, 1990.
    ; Mrs Gordon Smythies
    Kirk, John Foster, and S. Austin Allibone, editors. A Supplement to Allibone’s Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors. J. B. Lippincott, 1891, 2 vols.
    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, 1990.
    When she left her husband, HS went over from using the name she bore as his wife, to a version that combined her birth name with his.
  • Married: Smythies

Milestones

Probably 1813

Harriet Maria Gordon (later HS ) was born at Margate in Kent. If the date is correct she was the eldest in a family of three.
Recent submissions to the FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service give her a slightly later though no more precise birth-date.
Cross, Nigel. The Common Writer. Cambridge University Press, 1985.
188
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, 1990.

By 22 August 1835

The future HS (not yet married) reached publication for the first time with her anonymous narrative poem The Bride of Siena.
Athenæum. J. Lection.
408 (1835): 640

After 11 February 1840

Harriet Gordon (later Smythies) published anonymously Cousin Geoffrey, the Old Bachelor. A Novel. To which is added Claude Stocq, a novel sharing three volumes with the unrelated Claude Stocq: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, translated from French by Theodore Hook .
The spelling of the title is a vexed issue. The original Bentley edition (both on the title-page and in Hook's Advertisement) spells Geoffrey (and is followed by standard library catalogues), but the running head of volume one (only) spells Geoffry. The 1859 reprint, perhaps following the running head, also spells Geoffry, though this is corrected by most library catalogues.
Hook, Theodore, and Harriet Smythies. “Advertisement”. Cousin Geoffrey, edited by Theodore Hook and Theodore Hook, Richard Bentley, 1840.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Smythies, Harriet. Cousin Geoffrey. Editor Hook, Theodore, Routledge, 1859.
345

1875

HS entitled her novel of this year (listed as her final one by both Montague Summers and the British Library Catalogue) Eva's Fortunes.
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.
Summers, Montague. “Mrs. Gordon Smythies”. Modern Language Notes, Vol.
60
, No. 6, June 1945, pp. 359-64.
364

15 August 1883

HS died at 24 Brunswick Square, her house in London, after a long illness.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Cross, Nigel. The Common Writer. Cambridge University Press, 1985.
191
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, 1990.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(21 August 1883): 1

Biography

Birth and Family

Probably 1813

Harriet Maria Gordon (later HS ) was born at Margate in Kent. If the date is correct she was the eldest in a family of three.
Recent submissions to the FamilySearch Internet Genealogy Service give her a slightly later though no more precise birth-date.
Cross, Nigel. The Common Writer. Cambridge University Press, 1985.
188
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, 1990.

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