Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes

Belloc Lowndes earlier in life

File:Novelist Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes.jpg

On board The Aquitania, April 14, 1936. © Corbis

Marie Adelaide Elizabeth Rayner Lowndes, née Belloc (5 August 1868 – 14 November 1947), was a prolific English novelist.

Active from 1898 until her death, she had a literary reputation for combining exciting incident with psychological interest. Two of her works were adapted for the screen.

Early life and personal life

Born in Marylebone, London and raised in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France, Mrs Belloc Lowndes was the only daughter of French barrister Louis Belloc and English feminist Bessie Parkes. Her younger brother was Hilaire Belloc, whom she wrote of in her last work, The Young Hilaire Belloc (published posthumously in 1956). Her paternal grandfather was the French painter Jean-Hilaire Belloc, and her maternal great-great-grandfather was Joseph Priestley. In 1896, she married Frederick Sawrey A. Lowndes (1868–1940). Her mother died in 1925, 53 years after her father.

Career

She published a biography, H.R.H. The Prince of Wales: An Account of His Career, in 1898. From then on, she published novels, reminiscences, and plays at the rate of one per year until 1946. In the memoir, I, too, Have Lived in Arcadia (1942), she told the story of her mother's life, compiled largely from old family letters and her own memories of her early life in France. A second autobiography Where love and friendship dwelt, appeared posthumously in 1948.

Death

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

Film adaptations

• Her most famous novel, The Lodger (1913), based on the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888, has been adapted for the screen five different times; the first movie version was Alfred Hitchcock's silent film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), followed by Maurice Elvey's (1932), John Brahm's (1944), Man in the Attic (1953), and David Ondaatje's (2009).

• Another novel of hers, Letty Lynton (1931), was the basis for the 1932 motion picture of the same name starring Joan Crawford.

Bibliography

2

External links

• Works by Marie Belloc Lowndes at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Marie Belloc Lowndes at the Internet Movie Database