Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett

Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett (1846–1930), also known as Mrs George Corbett, was an English feminist writer, best known for her novel New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future (1889).[1][2]

Life

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Corbett was born on 16 August 1846 near Wigan at Standishgate. Her parents were Mary (born Marsden) and Benjamin Corbett. Her father worked at a forge and she had a good education.[3]

Corbett worked as a journalist for the Newcastle Daily Chronicle and as a popular writer of adventure and society novels.[4] Many of her novels originated as magazine serials and not published in book form.[5]

In June 1889, Mrs Humphry Ward's open letter "An Appeal Against Female Suffrage" was published in The Nineteenth Century with over a hundred other female signatories against the extension of Parliamentary suffrage to women.[6] Inflamed by this "most despicable piece of treachery ever perpetrated towards women by women", Corbett wrote and published New Amazonia.[4]

While New Amazonia was the most explicitly feminist of her novels, it was not the only one to deal with the position of women in society.[7] Her novel When the Sea Gives Up Its Dead (1894) features one of the earliest female detectives in fiction, Annie Cory,[8] and is itself preceded by Adventures of a Lady Detective around 1890, possibly published in a periodical.[9] Her writing was not universally well received, but Hearth and Home listed her along with Arthur Conan Doyle as one of the masters of the art of the detective novel.[7]

Private life

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She married, in 1868, in Sheffield, George Corbett who was a fitter of steam engines and later marine engines. They had four children, of whom three survived childhood.[3]

Selected works

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Novels

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  • The Missing Note (1881)
  • Cassandra (1884)
  • Pharisees Unveiled: The Adventures of an Amateur Detective (1889)
  • New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future (1889)
  • A Young Stowaway (1893)
  • Mrs. Grundy’s Victims (1893)
  • When the Sea Gives Up Its Dead (1894)
  • Deb O’Mally’s (1895)
  • Little Miss Robinson Crusoe (1898)
  • The Adventures of an Ugly Girl (1898)
  • The Marriage Market (1903)
  • The Adventures of Princess Daintipet (1905)

Short story collections

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  • Adventures of a Lady Detective (1890)
  • Secrets of a Private Enquiry Office (1891)

References

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  1. ^ Duangrudi Suksang, "Overtaking Patriarchy", in Utopian Studies, vol 4 no 2 (1993)
  2. ^ "Fiction Mags Index". Archived from the original on 15 November 2010. Retrieved 7 June 2011.
  3. ^ a b Gracia, Dominique (11 May 2023), "Corbett [née Burgoyne], Elizabeth [known as Mrs George Corbett; other name Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett] (1846–1930), novelist and suffragist", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.92809, ISBN 978-0-19-861412-8, retrieved 5 July 2023
  4. ^ a b Beaumont, Matthew (2005). Utopia Ltd. : Ideologies of Social Dreaming in England 1870-1900. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers. p. 120.
  5. ^ Aqueduct Press - Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett. Accessed 18 Dec 2014
  6. ^ Ward, Mrs Humphrey, (1889). "An Appeal against Female Suffrage," The Nineteenth Century 25, 781–788.
  7. ^ a b Lake, Christina (Summer 2013). "Amazons, science and common sense: the rule of women in Elizabeth Corbett's New Amazonia". Victorian Network. 5 (1): 65–81. Retrieved 31 March 2018.
  8. ^ Women Detectives
  9. ^ Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn (March 2005). "Trouble with she-dicks: private eyes and public women in the Adventures of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective". Victorian Literature and Culture. 33 (1): 47–65. doi:10.1017/S1060150305000720. S2CID 163089934.
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