Ada Ellen Bayly

{{Infobox person

|name = Ada Ellen Bayly

|image=Edna Lyall 001.jpg

|birth_date = {{birth date|1857|3|25|df=yes}}

|birth_place = Brighton, Sussex

|death_date = {{death date and age|1903|2|8|1857|3|25|df=yes}}

|nationality = English

|occupation = novelist

|other_names = Edna Lyall

|signature=Edna Lyall signature.jpg

}}

Ada Ellen Bayly (25 March 1857 – 8 February 1903), also known as Edna Lyall, was an English novelist, who "supported the women's suffrage movement from an early age."XIX Century Fiction, Part II: L–Z, London: Jarndyce, 2020, Item 34.G. Lindop, A Literary Guide to the Lake District (1993) p. 311.

Biography

Bayly was born in Brighton, the youngest of four children of a barrister. Early in life she lost both her parents, so that she spent her youth with an uncle in Surrey and in a Brighton private school. Bayly never married. She seems to have spent her adult life living with her two married sisters and her brother, a clergyman in Bosbury, Herefordshire.

In 1879, she published her first novel, Won by Waiting, under the pseudonym "Edna Lyall" (apparently derived from transposing letters from Ada Ellen Bayly). The book was not a success. Success came with We Two, based on the life of Charles Bradlaugh, a social reformer and advocate of free thought. Her historical novel In the Golden Days was the last book read to John Ruskin on his deathbed;Drabble, Margaret (ed.) (1995), The Oxford Companion to English Literature (5th rev. ed.), Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. while Hope the Hermit was a bestseller set in the Lake District and later an inspiration for Hugh Walpole's Rogue Herries.G. Lindop, A Literary Guide to the Lake District (1993) p. 311. To Right the Wrong (2nd ed. 1894) is a historical novel about John Hampden and the English Civil War.

Bayly wrote in all eighteen novels, many of them offering interesting explorations of the writer's creative process.Darby Lewes, Auto-poetica (2006) p. 67 Part of her success was due to her practice of using characters from one novel in a different capacity in her next.S. Mitchell, Victorian Britain (2012) p. 468

Selected works

Won by Waiting, 1879
Donovan, 1882
We Two, sequel of the former, 1884
In the Golden Days, 1885
Autobiography of a Slander, 1887
To Right the Wrong, 3 vols, 1894
Doreen: The Story of a Singer, 1894{{cite web | last=Lyall | first=Edna | title=Doreen. The Story of a Singer, by Edna Lyall | via= Project Gutenberg Canada | date=14 January 2009 | url=https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/lyall-doreen/lyall-doreen-00-h-dir/lyall-doreen-00-h.html | access-date=6 February 2023}}
The Autobiography of a Truth, 1896
Wayfaring Men: A Novel, 1896
Hope the Hermit, 1898
The Burgess Letters, 1902

Citations

References

{{A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature}}

External links

{{gutenberg author|id=581|name=Ada Ellen Bayly}}
{{FadedPage|id=Bayly, Ada Ellen|name=Ada Ellen Bayly|author=yes}}
{{Internet Archive author |name=Edna Lyall}}
{{Internet Archive author |sname=Ada Ellen Bayly}}
{{Librivox author |id=2749}}
[https://books.google.com/books?id=ZQ4tAAAAYAAJ&q=%22Won+by+Waiting%22 Won by Waiting (1892) Appleton, New York (Google ebook)]
[http://thethird.freeforums.net/thread/990/edna-lyall-eighteen-fictional-productions Golden Gale] (all eighteen of her works of fiction)
[https://archive.org/details/lifeednalyallad00escrgoog Jesse Maria Escreet (1904) The life of Edna Lyall (Ada Ellen Bayly), Longmans, Green, and Co., London (Google ebook)]