Edith Henrietta Fowler

EDITH HENRIETTA FOWLER, born in 1865, was the daughter of the first Viscount Wolverhampton, a solicitor who became Mayor and was then a Liberal MP and a cabinet minister. She and her sister Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler were educated at home and began to write at an early age. The Young Pretenders (1895), illustrated by Philip Burne-Jones, and The Professor’s Children (1897), both novels for children, were very successful, the former being reprinted in 1911. Edith wrote a religious tract and two novels for adults and when she was 38 married the Reverend Robert Hamilton and went to live near Loughborough. She had two sons in 1905 and 1908. She also published three more novels and a biography of her father; meanwhile her sister Ellen became a successful novelist. In 1920 the Hamiltons moved to East Malling in Kent and in 1934 they retired to Overstrand in Norfolk, where Edith died ten years later.