Rhoda Broughton

A carte-de-visite portrait of the English novelist Rhoda Broughton (1840-1920).

Born the daughter of a vicar in North Wales, her grandfather was a baronet and her uncle the novelist Sheridan Le Fanu. She was first published by Richard Bentley in 1867 and by 1890 had published some 14 novels. However, she never quite lost her reputation of creating fast heroines with easy morals, which was true enough for her early novels, and thus suffered from the idea of her work being merely slight and sensational. Somerset Maugham later recalled: ‘I remember Miss Broughton telling me once that when she was young people said her books were fast and when she was old they said they were slow, and it was very hard since she had written exactly the same sort of book for forty years’.

Photographed by Alexander Bassano of London.