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.
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...
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...
Publishing
Jessie Fothergill
The copyright of the novel initially sold for £40 on 26 March 1877. Two months later, Richard Bentley and Son
recognized its commercial possibilities and drew up a new contract, increasing the price to £200...
Publishing
Mary Cholmondeley
MC
's best-known and most controversial novel, Red Pottage, was published by Edward Arnold
.
The University of Alberta
copy of Red Pottage contains a brief inscription from MC
to Rhoda Broughton
.
Colby, Vineta. “’Devoted Amateur’: Mary Cholmondeley and Red Pottage”. Essays in Criticism, Vol.
20
, No. 2, Apr. 1970, pp. 213-28.
214
Publishing
Mary Cholmondeley
Her publisher, Bentley
, had received the manuscript from MC
's friend Rhoda Broughton
. Bentley paid MC
£40 for The Danvers Jewels and £50 for its sequel, Sir Charles Danvers (also published by Bentley...
Publishing
Mary Cholmondeley
MC
produced three more novels following Red Pottage: Moth and Rust (1902, reprinted 1977), Prisoners (Fast Bound in Misery and Iron), 1906, and Notwithstanding, 1913 (published in the United States as After...
Reception
Helen Mathers
The book reached a fourth edition in 1876, just one year after original publication.
Mathers, Helen. Comin’ Thro’ The Rye. Fourth Edition, Richard Bentley and Son, 1876, 3 vols.
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...
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...
Textual Features
Margaret Oliphant
Oliphant develops an extended critique of her chief bugbears, Mary Elizabeth Braddon
(the leader of her school
), Rhoda Broughton
(not by name, but as author of Cometh Up As a Flower),...
Textual Production
Jan Morris
More than a decade later, in 1978, JM
followed her own portrait of Oxford by editing The Oxford Book of Oxford, a quirky anthology of often very short anecdotes and other excerpts, aimed less...
Textual Production
Hélène Barcynska
This was one of the six-shilling novels published by Stanley Paul
, a series including work by such writers as Rhoda Broughton
, Dorothea Gerard
, and Violet Hunt
. (The same firm issued two-shilling...
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.
qtd. in
Ellis, Stewart Marsh. Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu, and Others. Books for Libraries Press, 1931.
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...
