1920 Rhoda Broughton, who died on this day, wrote her own wry epitaph: ‘I began my career as Zola, I finish it as Miss Yonge’ (the latter reference was to Charlotte M. Yonge, 1823–1901, the Tractarian Movement spinster novelist, the embodiment of every Anglican decency).
Broughton, a Victorian bestseller, is undeservedly forgotten and unread by posterity. Born in 1840, she was the daughter of a clergyman, the granddaughter of a baronet, and distantly the niece of the Irish novelist, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (who encouraged her career).
Much of her childhood was spent in an Elizabethan manor house in Staffordshire, which supplied the setting for much of her fiction. Its well-stocked library, and much spare time, rendered her better-read than most of the women writers of her time.
Orphaned in her early twenties, and following a disastrous disappointment in love, Broughton went to live with relatives in Oxford. Here it was she became a favourite of Mark Pattison – the original of Casaubon in Middlemarch – whom she skewered, even more neatly (and more wittily) than George Eliot, with her depiction of the goaty old academic as ‘Professor Forth’ in Belinda (1883).
By this point in her career, Broughton had made her name, and her fortune, with steamy (for the time) and daring romances such as Cometh up as a Flower (1867), Not Wisely but too Well (1867), Red as a Rose is She (1870), and Goodbye Sweetheart (1872). They are everything their titles may suggest – but they were huge favourites with the three-volume, romance-addicted patrons of Mudie’s and W.H. Smith’s circulating libraries. She was, at this period of her life, in the elite £1,000-a-title class of Victorian writer. Six weeks, she calculated, was all that was needed for her sprightly bestsellers.
Alas the bulk of her readers died long before she did (of cancer, aged 80), and although she wrote to the end, she was regarded at best as a charming, but somewhat dusty, Victorian literary antique. Zola and even Miss Yonge (who has two very active societies dedicated to her fiction in London) have both fared better.