Matilda Barbara Betham Edwards

EDWARDS, Matilda Barbara Betham (also ‘Betham-Edwards’). b. Westerfield, near Ipswich, Suffolk, 4 May 1836; d. Hastings, 4 January 1919. She was the daughter of a farmer; she helped her sister to run the farm for a short time after her father’s death. She was educated at home, and then at a day school in Ipswich. For a short time she was a governess-pupil at a school in London. Returning to Westerfield, she wrote her first novel, The White House by the Sea, published in 1857 when she was only 21. She developed a strong interest in modern European languages, and lived for a year in southern Germany and Vienna (1862) and in Paris (1863). After the death of her sister in 1865, she lived in...