Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Marie Belloc Lowndes
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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.
Marie Belloc Lowndes
wrote that EAobtained very large sums for the serialisation of her books in the USA, and took the credit for having mentioned her name to the lady who then chose...
Publishing
Elizabeth Charles
EC
was offered £40 by Andrew Cameron
, editor of the Scottish magazine Family Treasury, to write on Martin Luther
. When her work was published as a historical novel, its unexpected success taught...
Publishing
Bessie Rayner Parkes
Her daughter, Marie Belloc Lowndes
, notes that BRPreceived an offer of forty pounds for a book which was to be called Peoples of France.
Lowndes, Marie Belloc. I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia. Macmillan.
107
Lowndes dates this offer of remuneration to...
Publishing
Evelyn Sharp
In March 1912 when Emmeline
and Frederick Pethick-Lawrence
were arrested, ES
became, almost at a moment's notice, acting editor (officially assistant editor) of Votes for Women, the official organ of the WSPU
. She...
Reception
Julia Frankau
The novel caused scandal both to Jewish readers, who judged it anti-semitic, and to gentile readers, who found its treatment of sex outside marriage too outspoken.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
According to Marie Belloc Lowndes
, Ernest Hart
tacitly...
Reception
Harriette Wilson
Contemporary admirers of HW
on literary grounds included Walter Scott
, who praised her dialogue and intelligence, and thought her out and out
Thirkell, Angela. The Fortunes of Harriette. Hamish Hamilton.
In the same year Marie Belloc Lowndes
thought it no wonder that Sitwell was, like her brother Osbert, hostile to many other writers and unforgiving towards those who were puffed: she is really very...
Reception
Cicely Hamilton
This novel was awarded the Prix Femina Vie Heureuse in early 1920.
Hamilton, Cicely. Life Errant. J. M. Dent and Sons.
157
The Times announcement of the award mentioned that it was worth £40 and that a committee (with Marie Belloc Lowndes
as president...
Reception
Agatha Christie
While AC
said that the idea for Hercule Poirot came to her out of the blue and was modelled on Belgian refugees she had observed in her home parish during the First World War, journalist...
Textual Production
Julia Frankau
As usual for fiction, she published as Frank Danby. This novel's length (120,000 words) provoked Marie Belloc Lowndes
to joke about the episodes of jeopardy being recurrent. JF
feared in 1911 that Methuen
would...
Textual Production
Katherine Mansfield
Scholar Claire Tomalin
suspects that this refusal had to do with KM
's unacknowledged debt to Chekhov
in The Child-Who-Was-Tired.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Mansfield was, however, feeling discouraged about all her work. In February, with The Garden...
Textual Production
Lady Cynthia Asquith
Her ten anthologies edited during the 1920s (some of them under pseudonyms such as Leonard Gray) had some significance for the writing of that decade, since they incorporated contributions from, for instance, Marghanita Laski
Textual Production
Agatha Christie
AC
published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a detective novel which pioneered the device whereby the narrator turns out to be the murderer.
Others, like Marie Belloc Lowndes
, had used a murderer's narrative...
Textual Production
Stella Benson
SB
had asked that no incomplete work of hers should be published posthumously. Her husband believed that she was quite happy about her writing, was sure of herself there, and had no thought of not...
Textual Production
Ann Bridge
Susan Lowndes (daughter of novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes
and so grand-daughter of suffragist Bessie Rayner Parkes
) was an old friend of AB
and was resident in Portugal with her Portuguese husband. The two of...
