Emma Jane Guyton

Life

Guyton was born Emma Jane Worboys in Birmingham on 20 April 1825 to George Baddeley Worboys (c. 1803–1867), a gunsmith, and his wife, Maria Lane (c. 1807–post 1887). She was a lifelong Congregationalist. She attended boarding school and may have worked as a governess.

Though Guyton described herself late in life as the widow of a Mr Etherington Guyton, a Baptist minister of French descent, no evidence for the existence of such a person has been found. She began to suffer from alcoholism, which brought about her death on 25 August 1887 at Clevedon, Somerset.

Writings

Guyton's first book, published under the name Worboise, was the novel Alice Cunningham (1846). It was followed by about fifty other novels with a Christian message, which were very popular in their time. Thornycroft Hall (1864), Crystabel (1873) and A Woman's Patience (1879) are among titles to have been reissued in print-on-demand editions. The theology that underlies Guyton's novels has attracted some critical attention. According to another recent scholar, "Worboise uses her novels to enter debates about the relation of religion to gender and to public life. Worboise's ideal is a wholehearted application of Christian values to all areas of life.... This holistic commitment to a religion of the heart, but also of action, in all areas of life underpins Worboise's challenge to the cultural division of sacred from secular, private from public, and feminine from masculine."

Guyton greatly admired Dr Thomas Arnold, the educational reformer and headmaster of Rugby School, whose life she published in 1859. She began to write for the newspaper Christian World in 1857. She edited the monthly Christian World Magazine and Family Visitor from 1866 to 1885, and many of her novels were serialized there.