Author: Smythies, Harriet Maria
Biography:
SMYTHIES, Harriet Maria, formerly GORDON (1807-83: findmypast.com)
Mrs. Smythies was a prominent Victorian novelist and woman of letters but she began her career some years before her marriage, when as Harriet Gordon she published a poem, The Bride of Siena, anonymously in 1835. The moral, according to the preface, is that “the entire devotion of the heart to an earthly object . . . is a species of idolatry.” Although her year of birth was given in the 1851 census as 1817 and modern biographies estimate it at 1813, the record of baptism for Herriette (sic) Maria Gordon, daughter of Edward and Jane Maria (Halliday) Gordon, reveals that she was born on 19 Dec. 1807 and baptised on 24 Dec. Her parents had been married at Walcot, Somerset, in 1805. Her father, a sergeant-at-arms in the royal household at Windsor, later went into exile on the Continent to escape his creditors. In 1835 when her poem appeared, Harriet Gordon was living in London and embarking on her independent career. She was the author of four anonymous novels already when she married the Rev. William Yorick Smythies (1816-1910) on 1 Mar. 1842 at St. Mary’s, Bryanston Square, London. They lived at his parishes in Northumberland (1844-9) and Kent (1849-56), where they had five children, only one of whom survived her. She continued to write. She put her name, Mrs. Yorick Smythies, to two patriotic poems in 1854, The Prince and the People and Sebastopol. But about that time strains in the marriage began to show, and they took to living apart, her husband retiring to his property in Kent in 1856 and she staying in London or abroad. In 1863 her last poem, published for the benefit of the Incurables Hospital, appeared under the name “Mrs. Gordon Smythies,” which was the form she favoured thereafter. She petitioned for a judicial separation in 1872 but he contested her version of events and she let it drop. She died at 24 Brunswick Square, London, the home of her surviving son, a barrister, on 15 Aug. 1883. There is an extensive file of successful applications to the RLF 1850-82. (ODNB 12 Nov. 2024; Orlando 12 Nov. 1884; findmypast.com 12 Nov. 2024; Essex Standard 25 Aug. 1883; RLF #1255)