Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Marie Belloc Lowndes
-
Standard Name: Lowndes, Marie Belloc
Birth Name: Marie Adelaide Elizabeth Renée Julia Belloc
Nickname: Mary
Married Name: Marie Adelaide Elizabeth Renée Julia Lowndes
Indexed Name: Mrs Belloc Lowndes
Pseudonym: Philip Curtin
Pseudonym: Elizabeth Rayner
During a career that spanned nearly fifty years from 1889, MBL
published journalism, biography, a guidebook, history for children, novels (mostly romances or thrillers), a book about actual crimes, and four late volumes of autobiography. Her books of crime and detection were her most successful. Her list of titles numbers more than seventy.
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When Woolf heard of her death she wrote in her diary of her sense of loss. And now, so quickly, it is gone, what might have been a friendship. Trusty & patient & very sincere—I...
Family and Intimate relationships
Julia Frankau
JF
's younger sister Eliza, later Aria
, also became a writer; more than Julia, she needed to support herself. She was a journalist, brilliant and witty, the founder of the school of gay flippant...
Family and Intimate relationships
Elizabeth von Arnim
This marriage produced in all five children: the first three, all girls, were born within the first three years. According to Marie Belloc Lowndes
, EA
retained her love and tenderness towards only one of...
Family and Intimate relationships
Matilda Hays
Marie Belloc Lowndes
, daughter of Bessie Rayner Parkes
, recalled MH
as a tall, handsome woman with a strongly featured face, very clever, and with a great deal of charm, particularly for other women...
Family and Intimate relationships
Bessie Rayner Parkes
Around this period in her life, BRP
ended a relationship with a suitor, her cousin Samuel Blackwell
, who had persisted in seeking her hand in marriage for more than ten years. Her daughter
classifies...
Family and Intimate relationships
John Oliver Hobbes
JOH
had a number of intimate relationships with men, including Lord Robert Crewe
and George Nathaniel Curzon
, whose name was linked with hers before his marriage in 1895, and again in the very few...
Family and Intimate relationships
Bessie Rayner Parkes
Her daughter grew up to become the novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes
.
Banks, Olive. The Biographical Dictionary of British Feminists. New York University Press, 1985.
She was born in 1868 and was christened Marie Adelaide Julie Elizabeth Renée Belloc (known in the family as Mary).
Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 240. Gale Research, 2001.
240: 189
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia. Macmillan, 1941.
87
Family and Intimate relationships
Violet Hunt
Elsie Ford dropped her suit against the Daily Mirror when it paid her £350 in damages and published an apology.
Belford, Barbara. Violet. Simon and Schuster, 1990.
197
But despite the fact that Ford was never legally divorced or remarried, he and...
Fictionalization
Alice Meynell
To many of her contemporaries (especially male contemporaries), AM
symbolised the perfection of Woman and Mother. Many descriptions of her suggest Woolf
's Mrs Ramsay in To the Lighthouse. Coventry Patmore
and Francis Thompson
Friends, Associates
Rhoda Broughton
RB
's vitality, sincerity, and pungent wit gained her the friendship of some of the most notable people of her day.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder, 1908.
Her wide circle of friends and acquaintances included Henry James
(the two became extremely...
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. Bloom, Abigail Burnham and John MaynardEditors , Ohio State University Press, 1994.
242
She uttered...
Friends, Associates
Rhoda Broughton
There her near-salon was attended by men and women belonging to every stratum of political, literary, and artistic society.
Times. Times Publishing Company.
(7 June 1920): 17
To the great regret of Marie Belloc Lowndes
, Broughton in the...
Living in the north, DW
remained outside London literary circles. She found the company of councillors and their wives rather dispiriting and seem[ed] to have so much of it (because of her husband's job).
Whipple, Dorothy. Random Commentary. Michael Joseph, 1966.
40
Friends, Associates
Elizabeth von Arnim
On her trips back to England EA
made some important new friends, including Maude Stanley
, a feminist interested in reforming London streetwalkers.
Usborne, Karen. "Elizabeth": The Author of Elizabeth and Her German Garden. Bodley Head, 1986.
85
Stanley advised von Arnim extensively on her children's education and helped...
Timeline
By 13 November 1886
Maxwell Gray
(whose real name was Mary Gleed Tuttiet
) published her well-known and highly successful novelThe Silence of Dean Maitland.
By autumn 1896
French erotic writer Pierre Louÿs
, already notorious for the lesbian Songs of Bilitis, 1895, printed at his own expense his best-known work, Aphrodite, about a courtesan in ancient Alexandria.
2 July 1914
The first issue of the magazine Blast, edited by Wyndham Lewis
, formally announced the arrival of Vorticism, an avant-garde movement in art.
January 1921
The Englishwoman, a monthly forum for serious feminist discussion, ceased publication in London.
21 July 1945
Just before the general election, Marie Belloc Lowndes
reported that empty houses in London were being requisitioned because of the housing shortage caused by bombing.