Rhoda Broughton - Life

Life

Rhoda Broughton was born in Denbigh 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. She in turn introduced to the firm Mary Cholmondeley in about 1887.

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, Bentley also published the one 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.