Name Anne Beale | Role Novelist | |
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Died September 19, 1900, South Hampstead, London, United Kingdom Books Gladys the reaper, The Pennant Family V, Rose Mervyn - of Whitelake | ||
Anne Beale (1816 – 17 April 1900) was a popular English novelist and poet, based in Wales. Her poetry, novels, and stories appeared in print for more than fifty years during her lifetime, "an unusually long career as an author".
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Biography
Anne Beale was born at Langport, Somerset. She was educated at Bath by "Madame de Bellecour". Her older sister Elizabeth Compton Beale was a singer by training.
Beale lived near Llandeilo in Carmarthenshire from 1841, at first working as a governess for the family of an Anglican clergyman. Her income from writing eventually allowed her to make it her full-time profession, instead of being a supplement to her teaching income. Late in life she moved to London, where she died at 68 Belsize Road, South Hampstead, in April 1900. As well as her girls' stories and a volume of poetry, she contributed Welsh-interest articles and poems to English and Scottish magazines.
Reception
Her depictions of Wales and the Welsh were admired for their sympathy and attention to detail. Said one Welsh newspaper in 1869, "She knows the country well, and her descriptions of its scenery, its institutions, its people are severely truthful but, at the same time, so skilfully done, and with so much warmth and character as to captivate every person who cares to read one of the best and ablest novels of the season." Years later, however, an American reviewer called Beale's novel Simplicity and Fascination "old-fashioned... bulky, verbose, full of stilted dialogue and verbose explanations."
Selected works
Gladys of Harlech (1858) and Country Landlords (1860) are both attributed to Anne Beale, but the title page of the original edition gives the author's name as "L.M.S", and the true author is believed to be L. M. Spooner.