English novelist, born in N. Wales on the 29th of November 1840, the daughter of a clergyman, who was squire as well as rector of Broughton, Staffordshire. She produced her first novel, Cometh up as a Flower, in 1867, following it at brief intervals by Not Wisely but too Well and Red as a Rose is She. In the English county society, in which she had been brought up, such novels were then regarded as too daring experiments, to be kept as far as possible out of the hands of the young. But this succès de scandale was short-lived and, as mid-Victorianism began to fade, Miss Broughton’s reputation as a shocker of convention soon gave place to a more sober recognition of her merit as a story-teller. “I began life as Zola,” she said of herself, “I finish it as Miss Yonge.” In the interval she had spent twenty years in Oxford, where she was a distinguished social figure, and the last thirty years at Richmond as a semi-invalid, and she had published some twenty novels, the latest, A Fool in her Folly, appearing after her death, with a prefatory appreciation by Marie Belloc-Lowndes. She died at Headington near Oxford on the 5th of June 1920. See also Good-bye, Sweetheart!
