Abstract
Few novelists have mountains named after them, but to her amusement Rhoda Broughton achieved such monumental celebrity. In 1876 Captain Clements Markham aboard the explorer ship Alert was mapping the northern section of Ellesmere Island at the North Pole, and he and his fellow officers solaced their leisure hours with Rhoda Broughton’s novels.1 So much pleasure had she given them that they christened one icebound peak ‘Mount Rhoda’ in her honour. She treasured the compliment. Her fame had sprung from two novels published in 1867, Not Wisely, but Too Well and Cometh Up as a Flower, considered rather scandalous because they described with unparalleled frankness girls falling in love. They stamped Miss Broughton as a new voice and also a rather fast and dangerous one that innocent young ladies should beware of, but there was a subtext of struggle, suffering and frustration that expressed the intelligent woman’s need for personal identity and fulfilment and this was undoubtedly what established her place in the front rank of popular writers. Though not by any means radical, she was in this respect a rebel.
She at least possesses that one touch of vulgarity that makes the whole world kin.
Oscar Wilde, Pall Mall Gazette (28 October 1886)
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Notes
See Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times (London, 1964) III, 161.
Percy Fitzgerald Memoirs of an Author (London, 1895), I, 167.
Leon Edel, The Life of Henry James (New York, 1972) V, 32; and
Thomas Anstey Guthrie, A Long Retrospect (London, 1936) p. 144.
Sadleir, Things Past, p. 116. See also John Sparrow, ‘An Oxford Caricature and Provocation’, Encounter, XXXIX (July 1972) 94.
Quoted by Estelle Gilson, correspondence in Encounter, XXXVII (Aug 1971) 92. See also The Diary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton 1880–1885, ed. Dudley W. R. Bahlman (Oxford, 1972) II, 400; and
Lady Constance Battersea, Reminiscences (London, 1922) p. 391.
Percy Lubbock, Mary Cholmondeley (London, 1928) p. 42. See also
Percy Lubbock, Portrait of Edith Wharton (London, 1947) p. 73; and
Forrest Reid, ‘Minor Fiction in the “Eighties”’, The Eighteen-Eighties, ed. Walter de la Mare (Cambridge, 1930) p. 122.
Edel, Henry James, V, 31. Lord Houghton’s receptions were celebrated. Thomas Hardy first met Rhoda at luncheon there with Robert Browning in 1883. See Florence E. Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 (London, 1962) p. 159 (first published 1928).
Edel, Henry James, V, 33. For a description of her in old age see Walter Sichel, ‘Rhoda Broughton’, Bookman, LII (Aug 1917) 138; and
Marie Belloc Lowndes, Foreword to A Fool in Her Folly (London, 1920).
A collection of twenty letters at the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin. The Hon. Florence Ellen Hungerford Milnes (1855–1923) was the daughter of Richard Monckton Milnes, first Baron Houghton. Her mother was daughter of the second Lord Crewe. In 1882 she married the Hon. Arthur Henry Henniker-Major. A great beauty, she was said to have partly inspired the character of Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure. Hardy was her devoted friend for thirty years. A writer herself (she published six novels, three collections of short stories and a four-act comedy), she collaborated with Hardy in the tale ‘The Spectre of the Real’. In 1896 she was elected President of the Society of Women Journalists. See One Rare Fair Woman: Thomas Hardy’s Letters to Florence Henniker 1893–1922, ed. Evelyn Hardy and F. B. Pinion (London, 1972).
Andrew Lang, Old Friends: Essays in Epistolary Parody (London, 1890) pp. 108–16.
Quoted in Silberg, ‘Rhoda Broughton’, p. 1, from Bonamy Dobrée and Edith Batho, The Victorians and After, 1830–1914 (London, 1938) pp. 274, and 301.
Elisabeth Lynn Linton, ‘Miss Broughton’s Novels’, Temple Bar, LXXX (June 1887) 199.
E. F. Benson, As We Were: A Victorian Peep Show (London, 1930) p. 312, attributed to Howard Sturgis. The earliest reference I have found to this aphorism is by Ethel Arnold, in Fortnightly Review, CXIV (2 Aug 1920).
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© 1983 R. C. Terry
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Terry, R.C. (1983). Delightful Wickedness: Some Novels of Rhoda Broughton. In: Victorian Popular Fiction, 1860–80. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-04460-3_5
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