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.
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.
After this HJ
seems to have done less professional acting, while The Stage reported in June 1888 that she was shortly to produce, as well as taking the lead role in, a charity performance of...
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.
Shattock, Joanne. The Oxford Guide to British Women Writers. Oxford University Press.
Fryckstedt, Monica Correa. Geraldine Jewsbury’s Athenaeum Reviews: A Mirror of Mid-Victorian Attitudes to Fiction. S. Academiae Ubsaliensis.
32
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Geraldine Jewsbury
GJ
's personal preferences are evident in the favour she showed to works with strong moral messages. She disliked sensation novels and was equally disapproving of detailed descriptions of physical romantic exchanges between characters. For...
Intertextuality and Influence
Rudyard Kipling
Baa Baa Black Sheep, in the same collection, is a strange, dark tale, based on Kipling's own experience, of how young Punch, aged five, and his sister Judy, three, are taken from India to...
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...
Fiction and the Reading Public was widely reviewed. In the Criterion of July 1932, T. S. Eliot
commended its argument: A society which does not recognize the existence of art is barbaric. But a society...
Intertextuality and Influence
Amy Levy
The novel alludes to two novels by Rhoda Broughton
, Cometh Up as a Flower and "Good-bye, Sweetheart!", disparaging these texts and sensation fiction in general. At one point, Judith wonders why clever creatures...
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Marie Belloc Lowndes
Out of her multitudinous acquaintance with writers, she selected about half a dozen to write about in detail. Women among these were Elizabeth of the German Garden and dear Rhoda [Broughton].
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. Diaries and Letters of Marie Belloc Lowndes, 1911-1947. Editor Marques, Susan Lowndes, Chatto and Windus.
251
But a...
Reception
Marie Belloc Lowndes
Samuel Hynes
in the Times Literary Supplement called this book a delight and its author a remarkable woman, yet he introduced his notice with some sweeping, casually sexist comment on that monstrous regiment of writing...
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...
Reception
Helen Mathers
The book reached a fourth edition in 1876, just one year after original publication.
Mathers, Helen. Comin’ Thro’ The Rye. Richard Bentley and Son.
titlepage
Until this edition, when it became A Novel by Helen B. Mathers (a pseudonym very close to the author's actual...
Reception
Helen Mathers
The success of her first novel gave HM
a large following. The Times sided with her followers, finding that Cherry Ripe!'s plot is . . . so worked out that the interest increases with...
Literary responses
Helen Mathers
This novel too was met with accusations of being a mere imitation of others' work. Fraser's even speculated that the author had written it perhaps . . . in sheer contempt for the art which...
