Cynthia Stockley (7 July 1873 – 15 January 1936) was a South African-Rhodesian novelist known for her romance novels usually set in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa. Her name before her marriage was Lilian Julian Webb. Cynthia was an adopted name.
Biography
Stockley was born in Bloemfontein, Orange Free State. Her mother, Mary Ann Webb (Corbett), emigrated from County Clare in Ireland at the age of 18, in 1859, whilst her father, Abel Arthur Webb, arrived from Northamptonshire, England, in 1861, at the age of 23.
Her mother died when Cynthia was two. Her father subsequently remarried, and Cynthia then lived with four siblings (one died in infancy), her step-mother, a half-sister, and two half-brothers. After attending St. Michael's School, Bloemfontein, she moved to live with her sister in Mashonaland.
In 1895 she married Philip Stockley (1870–1917), a member of the Mashonaland Mounted Police, in Salisbury (now Harare). They moved to Umtali (now Mutare) where her daughter Dorothy was born in 1896.
The Stockleys separated later in 1896: she to take up a career in journalism and writing, he to participate in the Boer War. Thinking Philip had been killed in the Boer War, she remarried. Her husband was Joseph Byrne (1870–1945), an Irish doctor in New York; their son Patrick was born there in 1905 pp99.
She also worked as an actress and bought a farm in Rhodesia and a house in Norfolk. In 1916 married Harold Pelham Browne (1880–1939), an officer in the British army serving in Paris pp288.
