Biography

Bayly was born in Brighton, the youngest of four children of a barrister. At an early age, she lost both her parents and she spent her youth with an uncle in Surrey and in a Brighton private school. Bayly never married and she seems to have spent her adult life living in with her two married sisters and her brother, a clergyman in Bosbury

Bosbury

Bosbury is a village and civil parish in Herefordshire, England. It is about north of Ledbury. According to the 2001 census it had a population of 780....

 in Herefordshire

Herefordshire

Herefordshire is a historic and ceremonial county in the West Midlands region of England. For Eurostat purposes it is a NUTS 3 region and is one of three counties that comprise the "Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire" NUTS 2 region. It also forms a unitary district known as the...

.
In 1879, she published her first novel, Won by Waiting, under the pen name of "Edna Lyall" (apparently derived from transposing letters from Ada Ellen Bayly). The book was not a success. Success came with We Two, based on the life of Charles Bradlaugh

Charles Bradlaugh

Charles Bradlaugh was a political activist and one of the most famous English atheists of the 19th century. He founded the National Secular Society in 1866.-Early life:...

, a social reformer and advocate of free thought. Her historical novel In the Golden Days was the last book read to John Ruskin

John Ruskin

John Ruskin was the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker and philanthropist. He wrote on subjects ranging from geology to architecture, myth to ornithology, literature to education, and botany to political...

 on his deathbed. Bayly wrote eighteen novels.

Select list of works

• Won by Waiting, 1879.
• Donovan, 1882.
• We Two, sequel of the former, 1884.
• In the Golden Days, 1885.
• Autobiography of a Slander, 1887.
• To Right the Wrong, 3 vols., 1894.
• The Autobiography of a Truth, 1896.
• Hope the Hermit, 1898.
• The Burgess Letters, 1902.

External links