Occupation Author Name Selina Davenport | Role Author Died July 14, 1859 | |
Selina Davenport (27 June 1779 – 14 July 1859) was an English novelist, briefly married to the miscellanist and biographer Richard Alfred Davenport. Her eleven published novels have been described recently as "effective if stereotyped".
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Early life
Selina Granville Wheler was born in London, England, on 27 July 1779, to Captain Charles Granville Wheler. At an early age, Selina met and later befriended Anna Maria and Jane Porter, who "both later to become successful writers in the early 1800s." Of the two sisters, Selina was closer to Jane, and the two women remained friends until Porter died in 1850.
Marital separation
On 6 September 1800, at the age of 21, Selina Wheler married Richard Alfred Davenport, a scholar and writer. They had two daughters, Mary, born in 1803 in Chelsea, and Theodora, born in 1806 in Putney. but they separated acrimoniously around 1810 for what Selina called "sufficient reasons". However, they never divorced and neither of them remarried.
After the separation, from which Davenport claimed she had been left with next to nothing, while her husband stated that she left debts of £150 incurred in running a school. She began writing as a means of support for both herself and her two daughters.
Novels
Selina Davenport wrote a total of eleven novels. Most of her works were published by Minerva Press (later A. K. Newman & Company), known especially for sentimental and Gothic fiction. At least two were translated into German.
Sons of the Viscount, and the Daughters of the Earl (1813) has a typical plot of family enmity over a previous seduction when two sisters fall in love with two brothers. One pair achieve marital bliss, the other are divided by "giddiness" and eventual death. Italian Vengeance and English Forbearance (1828) has an avenging woman shoot her seducer dead in a duel. A present-day literary historian has noted that it "use[s] Gothic tropes to sensationalize a domestic novel of manners." In societal terms, Davenport in writing "about and for women" presents in Donald Monteith, the Handsomest Man of Age (1815) and other works "their transformation from passivity to active involvement." There is "a subtle challenge of male authority through removing the significance of the male character in the plot, replacing his image of authority with vulnerability."
Penury
In addition to the eleven novels, Davenport supported her family financially in various business ventures, including running both a coffee house and a dance school. She also received some financial help from Jane Porter and some moral support (a letter to the Royal Literary Fund) from Elizabeth Gaskell. Her husband, on the other hand, sought to prevent her receiving payments from the fund.
Davenport abandoned writing in 1834 and supported her widowed daughters by running a tiny shop in Knutsford, Cheshire, the town on which Gaskell based her famous Cranford. Selina Davenport died aged 80 on 14 July 1859. She was buried at St John the Baptist's Church, Knutsford.