Harriet Smythies

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Standard Name: Smythies, Harriet
Birth Name: Harriet Maria Gordon
Married Name: Harriet Maria Smythies
Self-constructed Name: Mrs. Yorick Smythies
Self-constructed Name: Mrs. Gordon Smythies
Nickname: Queen of the Domestic Novel
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.

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Texts

Smythies, Harriet. The Jilt. Darton and Hodge, 1862.
Smythies, Harriet. The Life of a Beauty. 1846, 3 vols.
Smythies, Harriet. The Male Flirt. Blackwood, 1857.
Smythies, Harriet. The Marrying Man. R. Bentley, 1841, 3 vols.
Smythies, Harriet. The Matchmaker. Colburn, 1842, 3 vols.
Smythies, Harriet. The Prince and the People. 1854.
Smythies, Harriet. True to the Last. Hurst and Blackett, 1862, 3 vols.