Florence Montgomery - Life and Works

Life and Works

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).

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, with an unperceptive father and a son thoughtful and loving before dying young. Seaforth (1878) was a full-length novel for adults. Almost all her work is pious in tone and set in fashionable society. They continued to sell into the 20th century. Almost all 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 on 8 October 1923 in the family home in Belgravia, London where she had lived with two likewise unmarried sisters.