Life
1382-1906 [née Eliza Lawson Cowan; Mrs. J. H. Riddell]; b. 30 Sept.
1832, b. Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim; dg. of James Cowan, high sheriff of
Co. Down; moved to London after mother’s death, 1855; found publisher
for Zuriel’s Grandchild (1856); m. in 1857 J. H Riddell, an
engineer who incurred heavy debts (d. 1880); wrote more than forty-five
books; ed. St James’s Magazine; George Geith of Fen Court
(1864), the story of a hard-working accountant, shows close knowledge
of London commercial life; Irish material only in Maxwell Drewitt (1865;
rep Garland 1979), set in Connemara; Berna Boyle (1884), set in
Co. Down; and The Nun’s Curse (1888), set in Dunfanaghy, Co.
Donegal; supernatural themes feature in shorter pieces, e.g., title story
in The Banshee’s Warning (1894); other popular works incl.
The Race for Wealth; Above Suspicion; Struggle for Fame
(1883) is largely autobiographical; d. d. Ashford, Middlesex without clearing
husband’s debts; numerous of her books remained in print until the
1940s, while a large reprint series appears to have been launched in 1930.
DIW IF DNB IN JMC SUTH OCIL
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Works
Maxwell Drewitt ([1865]; new edn. ill. London: Arnold 1869); Struggle
for Fame (1883 &c.); The Nun’s Curse (London: Ward
& Downey 1887; 1890); The Race for Wealth (London: Hutchinson
1895), new edn. 458pp.; The Rusty Sword, or Thereby Hangs a Tale (SPCK
1894), 192pp.; children’s novel; Berna Boyle (London: Macmillan
1900), 443pp.; The Banshee Warning, and Other Tales (London: MacQueen
1903), pbk.
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Notes
James Cahalan, The Irish Novel: A Critical History (Boston:
Twayne Publishers 1988), classifies The Nun’s Curse (1888)
as a ‘Big House’ novel, and identifies Maxwell Drewitt
(1865) as an instance of the adaption of this form to tell a Fenian tale.
Barry Sloan (Pioneers, 176) cites Ridell [err. sic], C. H., Maxwell
Drewitt, (Lon. 1865), rep. with intro. by Robert Lee Woolf (Garland
1979), and describes it as an election-campaign novel, comparable with
Mary Laffan Hartley’s Hogan MP.
Dictionary of National Biography cites her as Charlotte ‘known as’ Mrs. J. H. Riddell; author of thirty novels, including George Geith of Fen Court (1864); commerce a frequent theme; co-proprietor
and editor of St. James’s Magazine from 1861.
Justin McCarthy, gen. ed., Irish Literature (Washington: University of America 1904); gives extract from George Geith of Fen Court. Mrs [Charlotte] J. H. Riddell b. 30 Sept. 1832, Carrickfergus, Co. Down; dg. high sherrif James Cowan; m. J. H. Riddell, grandson of Luke Riddell, of Winston Green House, Staffordshire, 1857; wrote under pseud. up to publication of George Leith, and issued thereafter, The Ruling Passion; The Moors and the Fens; Too Much Alone; City and Suburb; The World and the Church; Maxwell Drewitt; Phemie Keller; The Race for Wealth; Far Above Rubies; Austin Friars; A Life’s Assize; The Earl’s Promise; Home, Sweet Home; Mortomley’s Estate; Above Suspicion; Her Mother’s Darling; The Mystery in Palace Gardens; Alaric Spencely; The Senior Partner; Daisies and Buttercups; A Struggle for Fame; Berna Boyle; Mitre Court; Miss Gascoigne; A Mad Tour; The Nun’s Nurse; The Head of the Firm; A Silent Tragedy; Did He Deserve It?; A Rich Man’s Daughter, and Football and Fate [no bibl.-dates].
Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction (Dublin: Maunsel 1919), lists first novel, 1858 [but cf. John Sutherland, Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, 1988, infra], followed by nearly 40; remarkably clever and some very popular; deal[s] chiefly with social and domestic life among the Protestant upper and middle classes, London, Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire, Scotland, &c; few deal with Ireland; intimate knowledge of legal proceedings; incl. George Geith of Fen Court (1864); City and Suburb (1861); A Life’s Assize (1870); Above Suspicion (1875); Too Much Alone; Susan Drummond; Race for Wealth; Head of the Firm; intimate knowlege of law and business world in London; d. 1906. IF lists only those titles dealing with Ireland, Maxwell Drewitt ([1865]; new ed. ill. Arnold 1869) [adventures in Connemara incl. old-fashioned election, 1854; trial for robbery on Drogheda-Dundalk Railway; landlord, peasant, and dispensary doctor, Dr. Sheen]; Struggle for Fame (1883 and eds.) [part autobiog.; young girl sailing from Belfast to London with her MS; experience with publishers, and love affairs]; Berna Boyle (1900), 443pp. [Co. Down love story, c.1860; suitors with disagreeable relatives; uninspiring and unsympathetic Ulster folk; her mother, a vulgar, pushful woman; The Nun’s Curse (London: Ward & Downey 1887; 1890) [nr. Dunfanaghy, Co. Donegal, c.1850; inherited curse; Terence Conway tries to be model landlord; has intrigue with peasant girl and forced by his fiancée to marry her; she pines and dies; her son kidnapped, and returns as parish priest; Terence remarries and prospers]; The Banshee Warning, and other tales (Macqueen 1903), pbk [6 stories; banshee goes to London to warn Irish scapegrace, a clever surgeon plunged in debt; strange personality; ‘A Vagrant Digestion’, journeyings of hypochondriacal Vicar of Rathdundrum’; ‘Mr Mabbot’s Fright’ [called pathetic], and ‘So Near, or the Pity of It’ [called comic], honesty and proper pride of the Irish; with Larne-Belfast scenic railway.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of their Own (1984), bio-note calls her a sensational novelist using pseuds. R. V. M. Sparling, Rainey Hawthorne, Charlotte, and F. G. Trafford; b. Ireland, youngest dg. of High Sherriff; self-education, married after her mother’s death; first novel, Zuriels’ Grandchild (1856). Edited St. James Magazine [?] (ibid., p. 156).
John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction, (Harlow: Longmans 1988), lists Mrs J[oseph] H[adley] [Charlotte Elizabeth Lawson], pseud. ‘F. G. Trafford’, née Cowan, 1832-1906; ‘novelist of the City’ [London]; b. Carrickfergus, née Cowan, dg. High Sherriff Co. Antrim; avoided Irish settings in later fiction, though her background is sketched in Berna Boyle (1882); reached London in 1855, supporting her sick mother by writing; her difficulties recalled in A Struggle for Fame (1883); city novels incl. City and Suburb (1861); Mitre Court (1885); The Head of the firm (1892), the last-named about the self-sacrifice of Thomas Desborne, working in the firm headed by his worthless nephew; sharp observation of London; moved to Tinsley, and produced novels under profitable contract, such as George Geith of Fen Court (1864), her eighth, the story of a clergyman who leaves a disasterous marriage to become a successful accountant in the city, building up an estate for his illegitimate son by the doomed Beryl Molozane [bigamy, forged death cert.; a returned wife; deaths, deaths, and deaths]; hugely popular and successfully dramatised [and characterised by high-handed narrative and gloomy tone]; ed. and part proprietor of St. james magazine, founded by Mrs. S. C. Hall in 1861; mid-career fiction incl. Life’s Assizes (1[8]71), a Scottish story, and Above Suspicion (1876), a sensation novel; wielded literary power and patronage; m. JH Riddell in 1857, and cleared his debts by writing when he died in 1880; moved to Bentley, and drew smaller and smaller royalties. Her fiction is categorised by Sutherland in three groupings as city, supernatural, and sad. Her ghost stories dealing generally with haunted houses, and esp. the influential Wierd Stories (1882), are highly regarded.
Belfast Public Library holds Daisies and Buttercups (1884); Prince of Wales’s Garden Party (1884); Nun’s Curse (1888); George Geith (1894); Berna Boyle (1900); Princess Sunshine (1924); A Struggle for Fame (n.d.); Senior Paper (1904); Weird Stories (1946). A REPRINT Series of 1930 apparently includes Austin Friars (1930); Berna Boyle (1930); City and Suburb (1930); Earl’s Promise (1930); Maxwell Drewitt (1930); Mortomley’s Estate (1930); Susan Drummond (1885); Too Much Alone (1930); World in the Church (1930).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)