Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Rhoda Broughton
-
Standard Name: Broughton, Rhoda
Birth Name: Rhoda Broughton
Pseudonym: The Author of Cometh up as a Flower
Beginning as a scandalous sensationalist known for describing with unparalleled frankness
Terry, Reginald Charles. Victorian Popular Fiction, 1860-80. Humanities Press, 1983.
102
young women falling in love, RB
became, in her later one-volume works, an assured writer of witty tales of English manners. Producing novels and the occasional short story in a fifty-year career which extended well into the twentieth century, she reveals a keen eye for social mores and an ironic treatment of the conventions of romantic love.
ATR
's collection of previously published reminiscences and literary criticism appeared as From the Porch, dedicated to Rhoda Broughton
.
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. From the Porch. Books for Libraries Press, 1971.
prelims
Education
Stella Gibbons
SG
learned to read fairly late, but then read voraciously. The glowing Eastern landscapes and brilliant figures
qtd. in
Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons. Bloomsbury, 1998.
20
of Disraeli
's Alroy and Thomas Moore
's Lalla Rookh made a particular impression. She also developed...
Fictionalization
Geraldine Jewsbury
Rhoda Broughton
's 1894 novel A Beginner contains a satirical portrait of GJ
in the figure of Miss Grimshaw, who reviews fiction with a tomahawk.
qtd. in
Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford University Press, 1993.
Fryckstedt, Monica Correa. Geraldine Jewsbury’s Athenaeum Reviews: A Mirror of Mid-Victorian Attitudes to Fiction. S. Academiae Ubsaliensis, 1986.
32
Friends, Associates
May Laffan
She exchanged letters with both George Augustin Macmillan
and Sir George Grove
. Her social circle while she was visiting London included a surprisingly large number of literary names. Rhoda Broughton
was a friend of...
ATR
wrote to Charlotte Yonge
a few years later, lamenting: oh! what a pity it is that we are all growing old who have had such happy happy times with one another.
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters. Editors Bloom, Abigail Burnham and John Maynard, Ohio State University Press, 1994.
Gérin, Winifred. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: A Biography. Oxford University Press, 1981.
260-1, 272
Friends, Associates
Marie Belloc Lowndes
Her literary friends of a generation before her own included George Meredith
, Rhoda Broughton
, and Henry James
. She participated in the friendship of the two last-named by being regularly at Broughton's house...
Friends, Associates
Mary Cholmondeley
According to Percy Lubbock
, MC
and her sisters entertained often and were charming and successful hostesses. Mary was nevertheless said to be a shy and modest woman who, while she found writing tedious, enjoyed...
Friends, Associates
Marie Belloc Lowndes
MBL
was an early member of Mary Cholmondeley
's Give and Take Club
for women writers, and a founding member of another women's luncheon club, the Thirty
. This included women from all walks of...
HJ
's circle of acquaintance in the world of letters and the theatre was very wide. As well as men of letters such as Edmund Gosse
, it included a great many women writers, among...
Friends, Associates
Ethel M. Arnold
EA, with her sister Julia
, was one of Lewis Carroll
’s child-friends. He helped her through a difficult childhood and the death of her mother, and she remembered him fondly in later years. Carroll...