J. H. Riddell

Charlotte Eliza Lawson Riddell (nee Cowan; 30 September 1832 – 24 September 1906), known also as Mrs J. H. Riddell, and by her pen name F. G. Trafford, was a popular and influential Irish-born writer in the Victorian period. She was the author of 56 books, novels and short stories, and also became part-owner and editor of St. James's Magazine, a prominent London literary journal in the 1860s.

Biography

Born Charlotte Eliza Lawson Cowan in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, Ireland, on 30 September 1832, Riddell was the youngest daughter of James Cowan of Carrickfergus, High Sheriff for the County of Antrim, and Ellen Kilshaw of Liverpool, England.

In the winter of 1855, four years after her father's death, she and her mother moved to London. The following year her mother died.

In 1857, she married Joseph Hadley Riddell, a civil engineer, originally from Staffordshire but residing in London. It is known they moved to live in St John's Lodge between Harringay and West Green in the mid-1860s, moving out in 1873 as the area was being built up. There were no children of the marriage.

Her first novel, The Moors and the Fens, appeared in 1858. She issued it under the pseudonym of F. G. Trafford, which she only abandoned for her own name in 1864.

Novels and tales followed in quick succession, and between 1858 and 1902 she issued thirty volumes. The most notable is perhaps George Geith of Fen Court, by F. G. Trafford (1864; other editions 1865, 1886), for which Tinsley paid her £800. It was dramatised in 1883 by Wybert Reeve, was produced at Scarborough, and was afterwards played in Australia.