Rhoda Broughton
Encyclopedia
Rhoda Broughton was a novelist.
in North Wales on 29 November 1840. She was the daughter of the Rev. Delves Broughton youngest son of the Rev. Sir Henry Delves-Broughton, 8th baronet
. She developed a taste for literature, especially poetry, as a young girl. Her favourite writer was probably William Shakespeare
, as the frequent quotations and allusions throughout her works indicate. Presumably after having read The Story of Elizabeth by Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
, she had the idea of trying her own talent and produced her first work within six weeks. Parts of this novel she took with her on a visit to her uncle Sheridan le Fanu
, himself a successful author, who was highly pleased with it and assisted her in having it published. Her first two novels appeared in 1867 in his Dublin University Magazine
. Le Fanu was also the one who introduced her to publisher Richard Bentley
, who refused her first novel on the grounds of it being improper material, but accepted the second.
Later on after having made her stretch her first effort to fit the popular three-decker form and to adapt it to the assumed taste of his readers, he also published the one he had at first refused. Their professional relationship was to last until the end of the Bentley publishing house, when it was taken over by Macmillan
in the late 1890s. By then she had published 14 novels over a period of 30 years. Ten of these novels were of the three volume form, which she so detested and found hard to comply with. After the commercial failure of Alas!, for which she received her highest ever pay being at the height of her career, she decided to abandon the three-decker and to create one volume novels. This decision resulted in her writing her finest works. However, she never got rid of the reputation of creating fast heroines with easy morals, which was true enough for her early novels, and thus suffered from the idea of her work being merely slight and sensational.
After the take-over she stuck with Macmillan and published another 6 novels there. By then her popularity was in decline. In a review published in The New York Times
12 May 1906 a certain K.Clark complains that her latest novel is so hard to procure and that one wonders why such a fine writer is so little appreciated.
After 1910 she changed to Stanley, Paul & Co, where she had another three novels published. Her last one, A Fool In Her Folly (1920), was only printed posthumously with an introduction by her long-time friend and fellow writer Marie Belloc Lowndes. It is likely that this work, which can be seen as partially autobiographical, was written at an earlier time but suppressed by herself for personal reasons. The story deals with the experiences of a young writer and reflects her own, like in her previous novel A Beginner. The manuscript is in her own handwriting, which is unusual, because some previous had been dictated to an assistant.
Her final years were spent at Headington Hill
, near Oxford
where she died on the 5 June 1920, aged 79 years.
Rhoda Broughton never married, and some critics assume that a disappointed attachment was the impulse that made her try her pen instead of some other literary work like that of Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie. Much of her life she spent with her sister Mrs. Eleanor Newcome until the latter's death in Richmond in 1895. She therefore somehow stands in the tradition of great lady novelists like Maria Edgeworth
, Jane Austen
or Susan Ferrier. But there are other merits that cause her to be placed in such high company. In his article on her Richard C. Tobias calls her "[...] the leading woman novelist in England between the death of George Eliot
and the beginning of Virginia Woolf
's career." He compares her work with other novelists of the time and concludes that hers reaches a much higher quality. Indeed her works of the 1890s and the early 20th century are fine novels and good fun to read.
The Game and the Candle (1899) is like Jane Austen
's Persuasion
(1818) rewritten. Only this time the heroine has married for rational reasons and is freed in the beginning for her true love, which reason forbade her to marry years before. Her dying husband's last will forces her to decide between love and fortune. In the renewed encounter with her former lover, she, however, is forced to discover that it was actually a good thing she had not married him. His love turns to be too shallow for her happiness. The novel is one of a mature and wise woman who has seen the world.
In A Beginner (1894) Broughton devices a young writer who has her work secretly published and then later torn apart by unknowing people right in front of her face. The novel deals with the moral issues of writing and whether it is appropriate for a young woman to write romantic or even erotic fiction. Scylla or Charybdis? (1895) has a mother hiding her infamous past from her son and obsessing about his love even to the extend of being jealous of other women, a plot slightly anticipating Lawrence's Sons and Lovers
(1913). The novel questions social conventions in its revealing how destructive they can be to quiet people who might have once stepped aside from the proper path. In a different way the same criticism is being made in Foes in Law (1900), where the main question is which lifestyle is the one productive of the highest degree of happiness: the one according to convention or that according to one's own private needs. Her next novel, Dear Faustina (1897), deals with a heroine that is drawn to a girl of the New Woman
type. This New Woman Faustina cares nothing for social conventions and dedicates her time to fight social injustice. Or so it seems at least at first sight, however, the reader gets the feeling that Faustina is more interested in getting to know and impressing other young women. That can also be interpreted as criticism of the New Woman. The homoerotic touch reappears in Lavinia (1902), but this time it is a young man who is frequently made to appear unmanly and even uttering the wish to have been born rather a woman. That novel also concerns itself with Britain's craze about war heroes. Very subtly it questions dominant notions of masculinity.
Always a very important feature in every of her novels is the criticism of woman's role and position in society. Very often Broughton's women are strong characters and with them she manages to subvert traditional images of femininity. This culminates in A Waif's Progress (1905), in which Broughton creates a married couple who turns everything traditional upside down and the wife fulfills the stereotypes of an older, rich husband.
During her lifetime Broughton was one of the Queens of the Circulating Libraries
. Her fame and success was such, that some found it worthwhle to satirise her in works like "Groweth Down Like A Toadstool" or "Gone Wrong" by "Miss Rody Dendron." It is a pity we do not know how she took such things. Perhaps she stood up to them as she did to people like Oscar Wilde
or Lewis Carroll
, who bore her no love. The latter is said to have declined an invitation because Broughton would be present. The former found a match in her when it came to ironical comments in Oxford society, where she was not liked much, either, due to her ridicule of that set in her novel Belinda (1883). Nevertheless, she also had many friends in literary circles, the most prominent of them being Henry James
, with whom she stayed friends until his death in 1916. According to Helen C. Black, James visited Broughton every evening, when they were both in London.
Today most of her works are out of print and even the original ones are very hard to come by. Especially those published after 1900 are very hard to procure. The most frequently still read are her mysterious short stories.
Her story "The Man with the Nose", narrated from a male viewpoint, is a masterpiece of subtle horror
. The story's last sentence, quite innocent in itself, intensifies the horror of all that has previously occurred in this story.
Life
Rhoda Broughton was born in DenbighDenbigh
Denbigh is a market town and community in Denbighshire, Wales. Before 1888, it was the county town of Denbighshire. Denbigh lies 8 miles to the north west of Ruthin and to the south of St Asaph. It is about 13 miles from the seaside resort of Rhyl. The town grew around the glove-making industry...
in North Wales on 29 November 1840. She was the daughter of the Rev. Delves Broughton youngest son of the Rev. Sir Henry Delves-Broughton, 8th baronet
Broughton Baronets
The Broughton, later Broughton-Delves, later Broughton Baronetcy, of Broughton in the County of Stafford, is a title in the Baronetage of England...
. She developed a taste for literature, especially poetry, as a young girl. Her favourite writer was probably William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
, as the frequent quotations and allusions throughout her works indicate. Presumably after having read The Story of Elizabeth by Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie
Anne Isabella, Lady Ritchie, née Thackeray was an English writer. She was the eldest daughter of William Makepeace Thackeray.- Life :...
, she had the idea of trying her own talent and produced her first work within six weeks. Parts of this novel she took with her on a visit to her uncle Sheridan le Fanu
Sheridan Le Fanu
Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was the leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century and was central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era....
, himself a successful author, who was highly pleased with it and assisted her in having it published. Her first two novels appeared in 1867 in his Dublin University Magazine
Dublin University Magazine
The Dublin University Magazine was an independent literary cultural and political magazine published in Dublin from 1833 to 1882. It started out as a magazine of political commentary but increasingly became devoted to literature.-Early days:...
. Le Fanu was also the one who introduced her to publisher Richard Bentley
Richard Bentley
Richard Bentley was an English classical scholar, critic, and theologian. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge....
, who refused her first novel on the grounds of it being improper material, but accepted the second.
Later on after having made her stretch her first effort to fit the popular three-decker form and to adapt it to the assumed taste of his readers, he also published the one he had at first refused. Their professional relationship was to last until the end of the Bentley publishing house, when it was taken over by Macmillan
Macmillan Publishers
Macmillan Publishers Ltd, also known as The Macmillan Group, is a privately held international publishing company owned by Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. It has offices in 41 countries worldwide and operates in more than thirty others.-History:...
in the late 1890s. By then she had published 14 novels over a period of 30 years. Ten of these novels were of the three volume form, which she so detested and found hard to comply with. After the commercial failure of Alas!, for which she received her highest ever pay being at the height of her career, she decided to abandon the three-decker and to create one volume novels. This decision resulted in her writing her finest works. However, she never got rid of the reputation of creating fast heroines with easy morals, which was true enough for her early novels, and thus suffered from the idea of her work being merely slight and sensational.
After the take-over she stuck with Macmillan and published another 6 novels there. By then her popularity was in decline. In a review published in The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
12 May 1906 a certain K.Clark complains that her latest novel is so hard to procure and that one wonders why such a fine writer is so little appreciated.
After 1910 she changed to Stanley, Paul & Co, where she had another three novels published. Her last one, A Fool In Her Folly (1920), was only printed posthumously with an introduction by her long-time friend and fellow writer Marie Belloc Lowndes. It is likely that this work, which can be seen as partially autobiographical, was written at an earlier time but suppressed by herself for personal reasons. The story deals with the experiences of a young writer and reflects her own, like in her previous novel A Beginner. The manuscript is in her own handwriting, which is unusual, because some previous had been dictated to an assistant.
Her final years were spent at Headington Hill
Headington Hill
Headington Hill is a hill in the east of Oxford, England, in the suburb of Headington. The Headington Road road goes up the hill leading out of the city...
, near Oxford
Oxford
The city of Oxford is the county town of Oxfordshire, England. The city, made prominent by its medieval university, has a population of just under 165,000, with 153,900 living within the district boundary. It lies about 50 miles north-west of London. The rivers Cherwell and Thames run through...
where she died on the 5 June 1920, aged 79 years.
Works
Somerset Maugham, in his short story "The Round Dozen" (1924, also known as "The Ardent Bigamist") observes: "I remember Miss Broughton telling me once that when she was young people said her books were fast and when she was old they said they were slow, and it was very hard since she had written exactly the same sort of book for forty years".Rhoda Broughton never married, and some critics assume that a disappointed attachment was the impulse that made her try her pen instead of some other literary work like that of Mrs. Thackeray Ritchie. Much of her life she spent with her sister Mrs. Eleanor Newcome until the latter's death in Richmond in 1895. She therefore somehow stands in the tradition of great lady novelists like Maria Edgeworth
Maria Edgeworth
Maria Edgeworth was a prolific Anglo-Irish writer of adults' and children's literature. She was one of the first realist writers in children's literature and was a significant figure in the evolution of the novel in Europe...
, Jane Austen
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...
or Susan Ferrier. But there are other merits that cause her to be placed in such high company. In his article on her Richard C. Tobias calls her "[...] the leading woman novelist in England between the death of George Eliot
George Eliot
Mary Anne Evans , better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist and translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era...
and the beginning of Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....
's career." He compares her work with other novelists of the time and concludes that hers reaches a much higher quality. Indeed her works of the 1890s and the early 20th century are fine novels and good fun to read.
The Game and the Candle (1899) is like Jane Austen
Jane Austen
Jane Austen was an English novelist whose works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature, her realism and biting social commentary cementing her historical importance among scholars and critics.Austen lived...
's Persuasion
Persuasion
Persuasion is a form of social influence. It is the process of guiding or bringing oneself or another toward the adoption of an idea, attitude, or action by rational and symbolic means.- Methods :...
(1818) rewritten. Only this time the heroine has married for rational reasons and is freed in the beginning for her true love, which reason forbade her to marry years before. Her dying husband's last will forces her to decide between love and fortune. In the renewed encounter with her former lover, she, however, is forced to discover that it was actually a good thing she had not married him. His love turns to be too shallow for her happiness. The novel is one of a mature and wise woman who has seen the world.
In A Beginner (1894) Broughton devices a young writer who has her work secretly published and then later torn apart by unknowing people right in front of her face. The novel deals with the moral issues of writing and whether it is appropriate for a young woman to write romantic or even erotic fiction. Scylla or Charybdis? (1895) has a mother hiding her infamous past from her son and obsessing about his love even to the extend of being jealous of other women, a plot slightly anticipating Lawrence's Sons and Lovers
Sons and Lovers
Sons and Lovers is a 1913 novel by the English writer D. H. Lawrence. The Modern Library placed it ninth on their list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century.-Plot introduction and history:...
(1913). The novel questions social conventions in its revealing how destructive they can be to quiet people who might have once stepped aside from the proper path. In a different way the same criticism is being made in Foes in Law (1900), where the main question is which lifestyle is the one productive of the highest degree of happiness: the one according to convention or that according to one's own private needs. Her next novel, Dear Faustina (1897), deals with a heroine that is drawn to a girl of the New Woman
New Woman
The New Woman was a feminist ideal that emerged in the late 19th century. The New Woman pushed the limits set by male-dominated society, especially as modeled in the plays of Norwegian Henrik Ibsen . "The New Woman sprang fully armed from Ibsen's brain," according to a joke by Max Beerbohm...
type. This New Woman Faustina cares nothing for social conventions and dedicates her time to fight social injustice. Or so it seems at least at first sight, however, the reader gets the feeling that Faustina is more interested in getting to know and impressing other young women. That can also be interpreted as criticism of the New Woman. The homoerotic touch reappears in Lavinia (1902), but this time it is a young man who is frequently made to appear unmanly and even uttering the wish to have been born rather a woman. That novel also concerns itself with Britain's craze about war heroes. Very subtly it questions dominant notions of masculinity.
Always a very important feature in every of her novels is the criticism of woman's role and position in society. Very often Broughton's women are strong characters and with them she manages to subvert traditional images of femininity. This culminates in A Waif's Progress (1905), in which Broughton creates a married couple who turns everything traditional upside down and the wife fulfills the stereotypes of an older, rich husband.
During her lifetime Broughton was one of the Queens of the Circulating Libraries
Public library
A public library is a library that is accessible by the public and is generally funded from public sources and operated by civil servants. There are five fundamental characteristics shared by public libraries...
. Her fame and success was such, that some found it worthwhle to satirise her in works like "Groweth Down Like A Toadstool" or "Gone Wrong" by "Miss Rody Dendron." It is a pity we do not know how she took such things. Perhaps she stood up to them as she did to people like Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...
or Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson , better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll , was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the...
, who bore her no love. The latter is said to have declined an invitation because Broughton would be present. The former found a match in her when it came to ironical comments in Oxford society, where she was not liked much, either, due to her ridicule of that set in her novel Belinda (1883). Nevertheless, she also had many friends in literary circles, the most prominent of them being Henry James
Henry James
Henry James, OM was an American-born writer, regarded as one of the key figures of 19th-century literary realism. He was the son of Henry James, Sr., a clergyman, and the brother of philosopher and psychologist William James and diarist Alice James....
, with whom she stayed friends until his death in 1916. According to Helen C. Black, James visited Broughton every evening, when they were both in London.
Today most of her works are out of print and even the original ones are very hard to come by. Especially those published after 1900 are very hard to procure. The most frequently still read are her mysterious short stories.
Her story "The Man with the Nose", narrated from a male viewpoint, is a masterpiece of subtle horror
Horror fiction
Horror fiction also Horror fantasy is a philosophy of literature, which is intended to, or has the capacity to frighten its readers, inducing feelings of horror and terror. It creates an eerie atmosphere. Horror can be either supernatural or non-supernatural...
. The story's last sentence, quite innocent in itself, intensifies the horror of all that has previously occurred in this story.
Partial bibliography
- Not Wisely, But Too Well – (1867)
- Cometh Up As A Flower – (1867)
- Red as a Rose is She – (1870)
- Good-bye, Sweetheart! – (1872)
- Nancy – (1873)
- Tales for Christmas Eve – (1873); republished as Twilight Stories (1879)
- Joan – (1876)
- Second Thoughts – (1880)
- Belinda – (1883)
- Doctor Cupid – (1886)
- Alas! – (1890)
- A Widower Indeed (With Elizabeth BislandElizabeth BislandElizabeth Bisland Wetmore was an American journalist and author, perhaps best known for her 1889–1890 race around the world against Nellie Bly, which drew worldwide attention.-Early career:...
) – (1891) - Mrs. Bligh – (1892)
- A Beginner – (1893)
- Scylla or Charybdis? – (1895)
- Dear Faustina – (1897)
- The Game And The Candle – (1899)
- Foes In Law – (1900)
- Lavinia – (1902)
- A Waif's Progress – (1905)
- Mamma – (1908)
- The Devil and the Deep Sea – (1910)
- Between Two Stools – (1912)
- Concerning a Vow – (1914)
- A Thorn in the Flesh – (1917)
- A Fool in her Folly – (1920)
External links
- Literary Heritage – West Midlands – profile and e-texts of five of her novels
- Works at the Victorian Women Writers Project