Marie Belloc Lowndes
Description
Marie Adelaide Belloc was the daughter of Louis Marie Belloc (1830-1872) and Elizabeth Rayner Parkes (1829-1925), born in George Street, Marylebone, London. Marie's mother, better known as 'Bessie', founded the Woman's Suffrage Committee in England in 1866 with her best friend Barbara Bodichon. 'Bessie' Parkes was the granddaughter of Elizabeth Ryland (c.1769-1824) and Joseph Priestley, Jr. (1768-1833). Those maternal grandparents were respectively the children of Samuel Ryland (1745-1817), industrialist of Birmingham, England, and Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), the Unitarian minister who discovered oxygen. 'Bessie' soon left her friend Barbara Bodichon to continue 'the cause' so she could marry in 1867 to a French barrister named Louis Belloc, move with his to France and converted to Catholicism. After having her two children, her husband died in August of 1872 from sunstroke she returned to England and lost all interest in feminist issues. However, Marie almost certainly got her writing skills from 'Bessie' who for eight years had edited the magazine "The Englishwoman's Review" considered a much needed voice for women seeking advancement in society during that time. Marie's brother, Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (1870–1953), although considered an influential writer in his own right was a Member of Parliament and possibly the most outspoken opponent to giving women not only the vote but also any higher education. Marie married Frederick Sawnay Archibald Lowndes (1868-1940) in Kensington, London, England in 1896 and began writing royal biographies and historical novels such as a piece called "H.R.H. The Prince of Wales: an account of his career" (1898). Together they had three children - Edmund Harold Lowndes (1899-1918), Elizabeth Susan Angela Mary Lowndes (1900-1991), Susan Antonia Dorothea Priestley Lowndes (1907-1993). Her work in her day was considered feminist, journalistic and sensational, and as was usually in the early 20th century publishers often encouraged reprinting works under different titles (particularly when republishing in the USA). They also thought it best a woman adopted a male pseudonym to encourage sales, hence the name 'Philip Curtin' was use when she wrote what was considered her most famous work "The Lodger" (1913) based on the Jack the Ripper murders and made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1927. A passage from "The Lodger" reads: > "It hadn't taken the landlady very long to find out that her lodger had a queer kind of fear and dislike of women. When she was doing the staircase and landings she would often hear Mr. Sleuth reading aloud to himself passages in the Bible that were very uncomplimentary to her sex. But Mrs. Bunting had no very great opinion of her sister woman, so that didn't put her out. Besides, where one's lodger is concerned, a dislike of women is better than -- well, than the other thing." "Noted Murder Mysteries" (1914) was her non-fiction work offering accounts of nine notorious murder cases including "an exceptionally full account of the Bravo Case" considered at the time 'an enthralling drama in itself, told with admirable conciseness and very considerable power'. Marie also used her mothers names 'Elizabeth Rayner' in her honor as the alias for her third book "Not All Saints" (1914) - her mother died in Slindon, Sussex on the 11 August 1925. Near the end of her own life she published two autobiography works - "I, too, have lived in Arcadia: a record of love and childhood" (1941), which was mostly about her mother, and "Where love and friendship dwelt" (1948). Then posthumously her work on her brother 'The Young Hilaire Belloc' was published. She died on 14 November 1947 at the home of her elder daughter, Elizabeth - Countess Iddesleigh (1930-1991) in Eversley Cross, Hampshire. She was interred in France, in La Celle-Saint-Cloud near Versailles, where she spent her youth.
Books
Uttermost Farthing
Laurence Vanderlyn, unpaid attache at the American Embassy in Paris, strode down the long grey platform marked No. 5, of the Gare de Lyon. It was seven o'clock, the hour at which Paris is dining or is about to dine, and the huge station was almost deserted.The train de luxe had gone more than an hour ago, the Riviera rapide would not start till ten, but one of those trains bound for the South, curiously named demi-rapides, was timed to leave in twenty minutes.Foreigners, especially Englishmen and Americans, avoid these trains, and this was why Laurence Vanderlyn had chosen it as the starting point of what was to be a great adventure, an adventure which must for ever be concealed, obliterated as much as may be from his own memory--do not men babble in delirium?--once life had again become the rather grey thing he had found it to be...
The Chianti flask
This is a thrilling courtroom mystery exploring the bitter effects of murder and its aftermath on the accused and those closest to them. An enigmatic young woman named Laura Dousland stands on trial for murder, accused of poisoning her elderly husband Fordish. It seems clear that the poison was delivered in a flask of Chianti with supper, but according to the couple’s servant in the witness-box, the flask disappeared the night Fordish died and all attempts to trace it have come to nothing. The jury delivers its verdict, but this is just the end of the beginning of Marie Belloc Lowndes’ gripping story. First published in 1934, this exquisitely crafted novel blends the tenets of a traditional mystery with an exploration of the psychological impact of death, accusation, guilt, and justice in the aftermath of murder.
The story of Ivy
Published in the United Kingdom in 1927, The Story of Ivy is a melodramatic murder mystery centered on a young woman, Ivy Lexton, who is caught up in the lifestyle of fashionable London during the Roaring Twenties. Having run through her late husband’s fortune after only a few years, Ivy chances upon a millionaire whom she seems to be able to charm—at least at first, before he refuses her further advances. Meanwhile, Ivy must also untangle herself from her devoted lover, a poor but handsome doctor. Considered by The Spectator to be one of Marie Belloc Lowndes’s best stories, The Story of Ivy was also adapted to the screen as Ivy in 1947, starring Joan Fontaine in the lead role. Lowndes chronicles the significant changes in the culture of post-World War I Britain along with the sensationalism of a murder mystery.
The lodger
A landlady begins to suspect that one of her lodgers might be killing the local women.
The Terriford Mystery
"The Terriford Mystery" opens with a very exciting cricket match in which a famous Australian team is beaten by one run. The host on that occasion was Henry Garlett, and it was he who, with a brilliant catch, won the match for the English team. The reader knows, therefore, that no matter how black the circumstances may be it was not Henry Garlett who poisoned his invalid wife while the match was in progress. The case against him proceeds with growing interest, and with more circumstantial detail until the very end.