Marie Belloc Lowndes

Marie Adelaide Belloc was the daughter of Louis Marie Belloc (1830-1872) and Elizabeth Rayner Parkes (1829-1925), born in George Street, Marylebone, London.

Marie's mother, better known as 'Bessie', founded the Woman's Suffrage Committee in England in 1866 with her best friend Barbara Bodichon. 'Bessie' Parkes was the granddaughter of Elizabeth Ryland (c.1769-1824) and Joseph Priestley, Jr. (1768-1833). Those maternal grandparents were respectively the children of Samuel Ryland (1745-1817), industrialist of Birmingham, England, and Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), the Unitarian minister who discovered oxygen.

'Bessie' soon left her friend Barbara Bodichon to continue 'the cause' so she could marry in 1867 to a French barrister named Louis Belloc, move with his to France and converted to Catholicism. After having her two children, her husband died in August of 1872 from sunstroke she returned to England and lost all interest in feminist issues.

However, Marie almost certainly got her writing skills from 'Bessie' who for eight years had edited the magazine "The Englishwoman's Review" considered a much needed voice for women seeking advancement in society during that time.

Marie's brother, Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (1870–1953), although considered an influential writer in his own right was a Member of Parliament and possibly the most outspoken opponent to giving women not only the vote but also any higher education.

Marie married Frederick Sawnay Archibald Lowndes (1868-1940) in Kensington, London, England in 1896 and began writing royal biographies and historical novels such as a piece called "H.R.H. The Prince of Wales: an account of his career" (1898). Together they had three children - Edmund Harold Lowndes (1899-1918), Elizabeth Susan Angela Mary Lowndes (1900-1991), Susan Antonia Dorothea Priestley Lowndes (1907-1993).

Her work in her day was considered feminist, journalistic and sensational, and as was usually in the early 20th century publishers often encouraged reprinting works under different titles (particularly when republishing in the USA). They also thought it best a woman adopted a male pseudonym to encourage sales, hence the name 'Philip Curtin' was use when she wrote what was considered her most famous work "The Lodger" (1913) based on the Jack the Ripper murders and made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1927.

A passage from "The Lodger" reads:

"It hadn't taken the landlady very long to find out that her lodger had a queer kind of fear and dislike of women. When she was doing the staircase and landings she would often hear Mr. Sleuth reading aloud to himself passages in the Bible that were very uncomplimentary to her sex. But Mrs. Bunting had no very great opinion of her sister woman, so that didn't put her out. Besides, where one's lodger is concerned, a dislike of women is better than -- well, than the other thing."

"Noted Murder Mysteries" (1914) was her non-fiction work offering accounts of nine notorious murder cases including "an exceptionally full account of the Bravo Case" considered at the time 'an enthralling drama in itself, told with admirable conciseness and very considerable power'. Marie also used her mothers names 'Elizabeth Rayner' in her honor as the alias for her third book "Not All Saints" (1914) - her mother died in Slindon, Sussex on the 11 August 1925.

Near the end of her own life she published two autobiography works - "I, too, have lived in Arcadia: a record of love and childhood" (1941), which was mostly about her mother, and "Where love and friendship dwelt" (1948). Then posthumously her work on her brother 'The Young Hilaire Belloc' was published.

She died on 14 November 1947 at the home of her elder daughter, Elizabeth - Countess Iddesleigh (1930-1991) in Eversley Cross, Hampshire. She was interred in France, in La Celle-Saint-Cloud near Versailles, where she spent her youth.

Adrian Room. "Dictionary of Pseudonyms: 13,000 Assumed Names and Their Origins", NC: MacFarland & Company Inc. (5th Ed. 2010)

George Watson, Ian Willison, J. D. Pickles, R.J. Roberts, Michael Statham, K.J. Worth (Eds.). "The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Volume 1", London: Cambridge University Press (1972)