Lily Spender (1835–1895)

"Uncommon first edition of this late novel by Lillian Spender (1835-1895), the grandmother of the poet Stephen Spender. 'In this noble story Mrs Spender takes her place in the front rank of living English novelists.' (Liverpool Mercury). Lillian 'Lily' Spender, usually known as Mrs John Kent Spender was born on 22 February 1835, and was the daughter of Edward Headland, a well-known physician of Portland Place, London, by his wife, daughter of Ferdinand de Medina, a Spaniard. Miss Headland was educated at Queen's College, Harley Street. 'On 28 October 1858 Eliza Headland married John Kent Spender (d. 1882), a physician and medical researcher who was attached to the Mineral Water Hospital in Bath, and she moved to Bath. It was then that she started writing - as the Revd L. Spender - and she sent essays to magazines, on German poets as well as on social issues such as women’s employment and the evils of the imprisonment of children. She was a contributor to the London Quarterly Review, the Englishwoman's Journal, the Dublin University Review, and Meliora, a magazine concerned with social work. She worked on several committees for educational and social work in Bath and, for ten years, was the secretary of the Oxford examination for girls. Lily Spender's first novel, Brothers-in-law (1869), was written with a desire to provide an alternative to sensation fiction as well as to supplement the family income for her sons' education (she also sent one daughter to Somerville Hall at Oxford), family holidays, and her husband's early retirement. An early novel, Parted lives (1873), was reviewed in The Spectator as the best novel of the year after George Eliot's Middlemarch, and most of her other novels received very favourable criticism. She wrote some twenty-one novels - about one every year until her death - in between housekeeping, raising her eight children, and various social service interests. ... Although intelligently written, her novels often have endings which fall into banal romance. They were, however, very popular and most went into several editions. [ODNB]. OCLC records five copies worldwide, at the BL, Cambridge, National Library of Scotland, Stanford and Queensland." (Pickering & Chatto, cat. 799, lot 83).… (plus d'informations)