Effie Adelaide Rowlands

Effie Adelaide Maria Albanesi (née Henderson, formerly Rowlands; 1859 – 16 October 1936), known by the pen name Effie Adelaide Rowlands, was an Australian-born British novelist. Rowlands published more than 100 penny and sixpenny romances during her lifetime.

Biography

Rowlands was born Effie Adelaide Maria Henderson in 1859 in Adelaide, Province of South Australia (present-day South Australia) to Alexander Henderson, a British theatrical manager, proprietor and promoter, and Marie Nelson (c. 1833 – c. 1834–1913), an English actress and singer who performed under the name Marie Sidney. Her parents were common-law married. The maternal granddaughter of the composer Sidney Nelson, Rowlands was the niece of the actress and vocalist Eliza Nelson and the actor Henry Thornton Craven. The younger sister of the actress Carrie Sydney Hope (née Caroline Sidney Henderson), Rowland was the elder half-sister of the actress and singer Blanche Massey, from her father's relationship with the actress Rose Massey.

Having returned to England, Rowlands was baptised in Southport on 8 July 1864. Rowlands later lived with her mother, who had became a writer, in Epsom. Following her father's marriage to the actress Lydia Thompson in 1873, Rowlands became the stepsister of the actress Zeffie Tilbury.

On 12 December 1882 she married Cecil Rowlands, a playwright who used the stage name Cecil Raleigh, and she started to write before they divorced in 1893.

In 1896, she married Carlo Albanesi (1859-1926), an Italian concert pianist, teacher and composer who from 1893 settled in London and taught at the Royal Academy of Music. They had two daughters, Eva Olimpia Maria Albanesi (b. 1897), and Margherita Cecilia Brigida Lucia Maria Albanesi (better known as the actress Meggie Albanesi) (1899–1923).