Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett (1846–1930), also known as Mrs George Corbett, was an English
feminist
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social gender equality, equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern soci ...
writer, best known for her novel ''
New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future'' (1889).
Life
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.
Corbett worked as a journalist for the ''
Newcastle Daily Chronicle'' and as a popular writer of adventure and society novels.
Many of her novels originated as magazine serials and not published in book form.
In June 1889,
Mrs Humphry Ward's open letter "An Appeal Against Female Suffrage" was published in ''
The Nineteenth Century
''The Nineteenth Century'' was a British monthly literary magazine founded in 1877 by James Knowles. It is regarded by historians as 'one of the most important and distinguished monthlies of serious thought in the last quarter of the nineteent ...
'' with over a hundred other female signatories against the extension of Parliamentary suffrage to women. Inflamed by this "most despicable piece of treachery ever perpetrated towards women by women", Corbett wrote and published ''New Amazonia''.
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.
Her novel ''When the Sea Gives Up Its Dead'' (1894) features one of the earliest female detectives in fiction, Annie Cory,
Women Detectives
/ref> and is itself preceded by ''Adventures of a Lady Detective'' around 1890, possibly published in a periodical.Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) was a British writer and physician. He created the character Sherlock Holmes in 1887 for ''A Study in Scarlet'', the first of four novels and fifty-six short stories about Hol ...
as one of the masters of the art of the detective novel.
Private life
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.[
]
Selected works
Novels
*''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
*''Adventures of a Lady Detective'' (1890)
*''Secrets of a Private Enquiry Office'' (1891)
References
External links
*
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Corbett, Elizabeth Burgoyne
1846 births
1930 deaths
English short story writers
British women short story writers
19th-century English women writers
19th-century English writers
19th-century British short story writers
English feminist writers