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."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 Their Happiest Christmas, 1886 Knight Errant, 1887 Autobiography of a Slander, 1887 A Hardy Norseman, 1889 Derrick Vaughan, 1889 To Right the Wrong, 3 vols, 1894 Doreen: The Story of a Singer, 1894 How the Children Raised the Wind, 1895 The Autobiography of a Truth, 1896 Wayfaring Men: A Novel, 1897 Hope the Hermit, 1899 Max Hereford's Dream, 1900 In Spite of All, 1901 The Hinderers, 1902 The Burgess Letters, 1902

Ada Ellen Bayly

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