Bertha Thomas
English author (1845–1918)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bertha Thomas (19 March 1845 – 24 August 1918), was a Victorian pro-feminist writer, author of the 1880 novel The Violin Player.
Life
Thomas was born on 19 March 1845 at Shelsley Beauchamp in Worcestershire.[1] Her father was Canon John Thomas (died 1883), and her sisters were the composer Florence Ashton Marshall and the professional clarinettist Frances Thomas.[2]
She moved to London in the 1880s, initially living with her father and her sister Frances at 16 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, until the father's death in 1883.[3] She completed seven novels, many of which were serialized in London Society, and which became popular in the circulating libraries.[4] There were also short stories, other writings and articles that were published in periodicals in the UK and the US.[5] A collection of her short stories was re-issued in 2008.[6] Like her sister Frances, Bertha remained unmarried.
Work
The 1880 novel The Violin-Player has been described as "perhaps the most triumphant narrative of female musicality in Victorian literature".[2] Her 1875 booklet Latest Intelligence from the Planet Venus, first published in Fraser’s Magazine, presented a satirical argument against giving women the vote. In The Son of the House (1900), a mother imprisons her son under the guise of insanity to protect the family inheritance - a subversion of The Madwoman in the Attic Victorian trope of an insane woman controlled by her male relatives.[3]
Thomas also wrote the libretto for her sister Florence's operetta Prince Sprite in 1891, published by Novello.[7]
Bibliography
- Proud Maisie, novel (published anonymously, 1877)
- Cressida, novel (1878)
- The Violin-Player, novel (1880)
- In a Cathedral City (1882)
- Life of Richard Wagner (Elzevir Library, 1883, translation of biography by Carl Friedrich Glasenapp)
- Famous Women: George Sand (Eminent Women Series, 1883, rev. 1889)
- Ichabod: A Portrait, novel (1885)
- Elizabeth's Fortune, novel (1887)
- Famous or Infamous, novel (1890)
- Sundorne, novel (1890)
- The House on the Scar: A Tale of South Devon (1890)
- Camera Lucida: or, Strange Passages in Common Life, short stories (1897)
- The Son of the House, novel (1900)
- Picture Tales from the Welsh Hills, short stories (1912) (reprinted as Stranger Within The Gates (2008)
