Lady Charlotte Bury

LCB had the example in her family of genteel women whose writing was an important source of income to them. Her relations had addressed some of her favourite fictional topics: marriage into the nobility from a position well below it, and re-marriage after divorce. She wrote poems as an adolescent, and published them before her first marriage. From this point in her life she was always short of money. Her first novel dates from the years of her first widowhood, and her output was highest during her second marriage. From the diary she kept while at Court, she printed non-fictional scandal memoirs on subject-matter similar to that of her seventeen or more novels—the life and scandals of fashionable society—but her own attitude, often reinforced by heavy-handed authorial comment at the ends of novels, is generally censorious as well as sentimental. She seldom offers happy endings: whether grave or trivial, the sins or mistakes of her characters most often lead them to suffering and disaster. The most scandalous and arguably the most interesting selections of her diary remain almost unknown.