Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes

Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes

Marie Adelaide Elizabeth Rayner Lowndes, née Belloc (5 August 1868 – 14 November 1947), was a prolific English novelist.

Active from 1898 until her death, she had a literary reputation for combining exciting incident with psychological interest. Her most famous novel, The Lodger (1913), based on the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888, has been adapted for the screen five different times; the first movie version was Alfred Hitchcock's silent film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927), followed by Maurice Elvey's in 1932, John Brahm's in 1944, Man in the Attic in 1953, and David Ondaatje's in 2009. Another novel of hers, Letty Lynton (1931), was the basis for the 1932 motion picture of the same name starring Joan Crawford.

Born in Marylebone, London and raised in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France, Mrs Belloc Lowndes was the only daughter of French barrister Louis Belloc and English feminist Bessie Parkes. Her brother was Hilaire Belloc, whom she wrote of in her last work The Young Hilaire Belloc (published after death in 1956). Her paternal grandfather was the French painter Jean-Hilaire Belloc and her maternal great-grandfather was Joseph Priestley. In 1896 she married Frederick Sawrey A. Lowndes (1868-1940).

Her first novel, H.R.H. The Prince of Wales: an account of his career, was published in 1898. From then on novels, reminiscences and plays came from her quill at the rate of one per year until 1946. In the memoir, I, too, Have Lived in Arcadia, published in 1942, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes' mother died in 1925, fifteen years before her father, and she told the story of her mother's life, compiled largely from old family letters and her own memories of her early life in France. She continued her autobiography in 1948 in Where love and friendship dwelt.

She died 14 November 1947 at the home of her elder daughter, Countess Iddesleigh (wife of the third Earl) in Eversley Cross, Hampshire. She was interred in France, in La Celle-Saint-Cloud near Versailles, where she spent her youth.