Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Edwards, Matilda Barbara Betham-
EDWARDS, MATILDA BARBARA BETHAM- (1836-1919), novelist and writer on French life, the fourth daughter of Edward Edwards, farmer, by his wife, Barbara, daughter of the Rev. William Betham [q.v.], was born at Westerfield, Suffolk, 4 March 1836. She inherited literary traditions through her uncle, Sir William Betham [q.v.] and her aunt Mary Matilda Betham [q.v.], and was herself often confused, to her annoyance, with her cousin Amelia Blandford Edwards [q.v.], the Egyptologist. In the main she educated herself, browsing at random among her father’s books, but she went for a time to an Ipswich day-school, and later, after six unhappy months at a Peckham boarding-school, visited Germany and France to improve her languages. After her father’s death in 1864, she carried on his farm till her only unmarried sister died in 1865, when she went to live in London. There she made many friends, among them Madame Bodichon [q.v.] who introduced her to George Eliot and George Henry Lewes [q.v.]. She also travelled widely, especially in France, where she lived in French families, made many friends, most of them in republican and anti-clerical circles in the provinces, and in interpreting the land and its people to her own countrymen did services which were recognized in 1891 by her appointment as officier de l’instruction publique de France. From 1884 onwards she lived a retired life at Hastings, where she died on 4 January 1919.
Miss Betham-Edwards was always proud to remember that Charles Dickens accepted her first verses, The Golden Bee, and published them, not as she herself said, in Household Words, but in All the Year Round (vol. iii, p. 108, 1860). Her literary reputation, however, rests upon her prose writings. She had not imaginative power of the highest order; but she had a natural gift for story-telling, combined with close observation and a retentive memory. She made repeated use, always with freshness, of a comparatively narrow range of material—recollections of Suffolk, strong anti-clerical and other prejudices, lasting enthusiasm for certain persons and certain books, and above all an intense attachment to France. She felt it her duty to hold aloof from political or other interests which might distract her from her writing, imposed upon herself a rigid rule of life, and was thus able to achieve an enormous output. When in 1917 she kept the ‘diamond jubilee’ of her literary life, there were only eight out of the preceding sixty years which had not seen her produce at least one new book or new edition. Her first novel, The White House by the Sea, appeared in 1857, herald of a long series in which Dr. Jacob (1864), Kitty (1869), and Lord of the Harvest (1899) are perhaps the best known. French Men, Women, and Books (1910) and Twentieth-Century France (1917) may be named among her numerous books on French subjects. She edited the Travels in France (1889) and the Autobiography and Correspondence (1898) of Arthur Young [q.v.], endeared to her by his Suffolk birth. Her own personality and the influences which most affected her are frankly revealed in her Reminiscences (1898) and Mid-Victorian Memories (1919), though the biographical details are sometimes difficult to follow.
[The Times, 7 January 1919; Miss Betham-Edwards’s Reminiscences; personal sketch by Sarah Grand, prefixed to Mid-Victorian Memories; private information.]