Rhoda Broughton Biography

In her novel Good-bye, Sweetheart! (1872), Rhoda Broughton categorizes two kinds of fiction: novels proper and novels improper, "novels that are milk for babes and novels that are almost too strong meat for men." The public considered hers to be of the latter kind, and lapped them up. Yet Rhoda Broughton may justly be rated considerably higher than as a writer of torrid love stories, chiefly for her insights into female psychology and for her contribution to the history of English manners.

The youngest of three daughters, Miss Broughton was born on 29 November 1840 at Segryd Hall, near Denbigh, Wales. Her grandfather was Sir Henry Delves Broughton; her father, a clergyman, held the living of Broughton, Staffordshire, where Rhoda grew up at the rectory. She was educated at home by her father, whose learning inspired her love of literature. With the aid of her uncle, Sheridan Le Fanu, she published anonymously her first two novels, Not Wisely but Too Well and Cometh Up as a Flower, in 1867. After that, living with her sister, first in Richmond and then in Oxford, where her conversational gifts made her a celebrity, she systematically turned out a novel almost every two years until her death on 5 June 1920. In all, she produced twenty-five novels and two collections of stories, most of them serialized in Temple Bar before book publication by her devoted and patient publisher, George Bentley. She ended her career living in London, adored by a wide circle of artistic and aristocratic friends--among them Henry James, who knew her for almost a quarter of a century.

Charges that her writing was fast and frivolous surrounded her early work. Critics castigated her for her frankness about female sexuality and her want of propriety; her heroines, it seemed to Mrs. Oliphant, did not seem too particular in drawing the line between being made love to and making it. Certainly it seemed that Miss Broughton went out of her way to draw the critics' fire; and while she recoiled from the virulence of some of the criticism, she enjoyed shocking the straitlaced with a succession of tales about precocious young girls surrendering to disastrous love affairs or caught up in loveless marriages.Such is the pattern of Not Wisely but Too Well and Cometh Up as a Flower, which were the first of her numerous successes, to be followed by such flamboyant works as Red as a Rose is She (1870), Good-bye, Sweetheart! , and several with the heroine's name, Nancy (1873), Joan (1876), and Belinda (1883).

Despising the mode of storytellers like Mrs. Craik or Charlotte Yonge, whose male characters she likened to "old governesses in trousers," Miss Broughton drew her men and women large. Her men are ruddy-cheeked philistines with gnarled throats and much in common with G. A. Lawrence's Guy Livingstone, though Miss Broughton did not welcome the comparison. Her fleshy heroines have healthy appetites and act with great spirit and brashness. In Good-bye, Sweetheart!, for example, Lenore Herrick dons peasant costume to check out the male talent in a Breton town and virtually picks up Paul le Mesurier. Despite misgivings he lets her persuade him to take her out in a boat by moonlight. The narrative is charged with images of water-lily cups as white chalices, and as Lenore stretches out her half-recumbent form, a moonbeam catches her white arm reaching for a bud which she offers to Paul: "Keep it as a memento of the fast girl who would go out boating with you, against your will, at ten o'clock at night--of the girl who may be very good fun, if one goes in for that sort of thing, but is not your style." Impulsively she throws the bud into the river. He grabs for it and upsets the boat. Ashore she takes a nip of brandy, lets him wring out her petticoats, and returns to the hotel minus a shoe. All this is very typical Broughton. As Alfred Austin put it: "Life, verve, elasticity, pervade her pages."

Such elements are the saving grace of Broughton's conventional plotting and melodramatic endings. Again, Good-bye, Sweetheart! is typical: pride parts the two lovers and eventually Lenore dies of consumption. The heroines in Broughton's novels who appear so vigorously to kick over the traces, suggesting some valid concern in the authoress for quirks of behavior or feminine needs, have in the end to fit conventions of the popular novel and pay for their independence. For Rhoda Broughton was at bottom thoroughly moral and conventional herself. Thus the fizz and crackle of early parts of the novels tend to die out, and in the resolution of interesting human dilemmas the author is always bound by the prejudices of her age, one reason why Oscar Wilde could say of her she had that one touch of vulgarity that makes the whole world kin.

However, it is unwise to focus on the love scenes and their outcome, for Rhoda Broughton's merits lie elsewhere: in the way she expressed female passion with psychological acuity and painful awareness; in her lively plots, sinewy dialogue, and vividly realized English settings. She had a keen eye for the social milieu and class-determining marks, and like many Victorian novelists was fascinated by people on their way up or down. Such observation makes Joan and Belinda still readable (the latter contains also a portrait of Mark Pattison). Her work from about the time of Nancy abounds in more thoughtful studies of intricate domestic situations, with Second Thoughts (1880), Doctor Cupid (1886), Mrs. Bligh (1892), and Foes in Law (1900) being among the best. In addition she wrote a fine pair of stories of the supernatural, Betty's Visions and Mrs. Smith of Longmains (1886). Michael Sadleir decided that Rhoda Broughton's best works were the single-volume novels beginning with Mrs. Bligh. A Beginner (1894) and her last novel, A Fool in Her Folly (1920), both about young writers involved in love affairs, he argued, were probably fictionalized accounts of an unhappy romance in Broughton's own early life. There is no evidence on this point. The later novels show more sobriety and control, but the vitality and daring of her earlier work is diminished.

It is important to separate Miss Broughton's true contribution from her notoriety. She stands apart from sensationalists like Miss Braddon or the "wicked" romancers Ouida and Marie Corelli as a sound analyst of the female mind and a shrewd commentator on the domestic scene. At a time when women novelists humbugged a good deal, Rhoda Broughton's novels still have a refreshing pungency and candor.