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.
At the height of her career JSW
gave an account of her early development to the memoirist George Bainton
. She said she hardly knew how or why she came to be able to write...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Sophie Veitch
SV
's Current Fiction despatches nine novels (all but one from 1885), but subordinates them to an over-arching critical position that novelists must have a clear, definite, and deliberately formed opinion as to the object...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Anthony Trollope
The critical opinions he voices here are often cited. Chapter 13, entitled On English Novelists of the Present Day, gives first place to Thackeray
and second to George Eliot
. On her he voices...
Intertextuality and Influence
Elizabeth Taylor
ET
's protagonist, a monster of egotism, mentions Rhoda Broughton
and Corelli
in connection with her own work, but only to suggest that hers is worth yet greater sums of money than theirs.
Taylor, Elizabeth, and Paul Bailey. Angel. Virago.
76
She...
Friends, Associates
Anna Steele
Through her youngest sister AS
met many key figures of the day, including Irish Home-Rule leader Charles Stewart Parnell
(Katherine O'Shea's long-term lover and eventual husband), and Justin McCarthy
, novelist and Irish Home-Rule MP...
Occupation
Constance Smedley
Since the Langham Place Group
had provided a social space for women in 1860, several organizations had already challenged the flourishing institution of men's clubs. The Lyceum Club
came on the scene at a time...
Dedications
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
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.
prelims
Friends, Associates
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
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.
Gérin, Winifred. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: A Biography. Oxford University Press.
272-3
Ritchie, Anne Thackeray, and Hester Helen Thackeray Fuller. Letters of Anne Thackeray Ritchie. J. Murray.
285-7
Literary responses
Anne Thackeray Ritchie
Geraldine Jewsbury
in the Athenæum saw considerable promise in the book, but blamed it for verging on a treatment of incest which ought to be . . . inadmissable for a novel.
Shankman, Lillian F., and Anne Thackeray Ritchie. “Biographical Commentary and Notes”. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters, edited by Abigail Burnham Bloom et al., Ohio State University Press, p. various pages.
67
The Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers: 1830-1870. http://replay.web.archive.org/20070714065452/http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~asp/v2/home.html.
Trollope
admired her work alongside that of Rhoda Broughton
, though he thought her writing lazy.
Shankman, Lillian F., and Anne Thackeray Ritchie. “Biographical Commentary and Notes”. Anne Thackeray Ritchie: Journals and Letters, edited by Abigail Burnham Bloom et al., Ohio State University Press, p. various pages.
164
Robert Louis Stevenson
dedicated a poem to her, inciting her to further literary biographies after reading A Book...
Textual Production
Charlotte Riddell
Furniss quoted with relish her allegedly low opinion of Ellen Wood
, as simply a brute, she throws in bits of religion to slip her fodder down the public throat.
Ellis, Stewart Marsh. Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu, and Others. Books for Libraries Press.
