Ada Ellen Bayly

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."<ref name="Jarndyce">XIX Century Fiction, Part II: L–Z, London: Jarndyce, 2020, Item 34.</ref><ref>G. Lindop, A Literary Guide to the Lake District (1993) p. 311.</ref>

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;<ref>Drabble, Margaret (ed.) (1995), The Oxford Companion to English Literature (5th rev. ed.), Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.</ref> while Hope the Hermit was a bestseller set in the Lake District and later an inspiration for Hugh Walpole's Rogue Herries.<ref>G. Lindop, A Literary Guide to the Lake District (1993) p. 311.</ref> To Right the Wrong (2nd ed. 1894) is a historical novel about John Hampden and the English Civil War.<ref name="Jarndyce"/>

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

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<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
• The Autobiography of a Truth, 1896
• Wayfaring Men: A Novel, 1896
• Hope the Hermit, 1898
• The Burgess Letters, 1902

References

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Further reading

• G. A. Payne, Edna Lyell: An Appreciation (1903)

External links

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• Won by Waiting (1892) Appleton, New York (Google ebook)
• Golden Gale (all eighteen of her works of fiction)
• Jesse Maria Escreet (1904) The life of Edna Lyall (Ada Ellen Bayly), Longmans, Green, and Co., London (Google ebook)