Florence Montgomery

For the American historian, see Florence M. Montgomery.

Florence Montgomery (1843–1923) was an English novelist and children's writer. Her 1869 novel Misunderstood was enjoyed by Lewis Carroll and George Du Maurier, and by Vladimir Nabokov as a child.

Family

She was born Florence Harriet Montgomery in Chelsea, London, on 17 January 1843, the second of the seven surviving children of Admiral Alexander Leslie Montgomery (1807–1888) and his wife Caroline Rose Campbell (1818–1909) of Hampton Court, Middlesex. Her father was also an MP. He succeeded to a baronetcy in 1878. He was a cousin of the novelist Baroness von Tautphoeus (1807–1893).

Florence Montgomery's story-telling abilities were first tried on younger brothers and sisters, but the novelist G. J. Whyte-Melville saw a story of hers printed for a charity bazaar, about a golden-haired girl whose mother dies of scarlet fever, and advised that it should be published. A Very Simple Story appeared commercially in 1867 with illustrations by her cousin, Sibyl Montgomery (died 1935), first wife of the Marquess of Queensberry and mother of Lord Alfred Douglas (1870–1945).

Works

Montgomery drew a distinction between her stories for children and her stories about children, which were intended for an adult audience as an encouragement to recognize children's merits. Misunderstood (1869), for instance, features an unperceptive father and a son thoughtful and loving before dying young. An edition illustrated by George Du Maurier followed in 1873. Writing to Charles L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) about that time, Du Maurier wrote, "Miss Florence Montgomery is a very charming and sympathetic young lady, the daughter of the admiral of that ilk. I am, like you, a very great admirer of 'Misunderstood,' and cried buckets over it."

Seaforth (1878) is a full-length novel for adults. Almost all her works are pious in tone and set in fashionable society. They continued to sell into the 20th century, but by the end of the century they appear to have lost their appeal. One reference book of 1990 comments that "her later works, such as Seaforth, 1878, and Colonel Norton, 1895, have vapid plots and characters." Charlotte Mitchell, in her entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, notes "an undercurrent of animosity against the modern young woman... for example Lady Jane Marton in Tony: a Sketch (1898), a hard, selfish, bicycling creature..." Vladimir Nabokov, on the other hand, recalls in his memoir Speak Memory that Misunderstood was the first English book his mother read to him, and "the fate of its hero Humphrey used to bring a more specialised lump to one's throat than anything in Dickens or Daudet."

Almost all Montgomery's novels were translated into German and French, and some into Italian, Dutch and Russian. Film versions of Misunderstood were made by Luigi Comencini (Incompreso) in 1966 and Jerry Schatzberg in 1984.

Montgomery died of breast cancer on 8 October 1923 in the family home in Belgravia, London, where she had lived with two likewise unmarried sisters for almost 70 years.

Bibliography

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External links

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• Good-quality online reproduction of Misunderstood (PDF) Retrieved 11 January 2016.