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Jessie Fothergill

Manchester, England, 1851 - 1891, Bern, Switzerland

Biographyhttp://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/n82085812
Fothergill, Jessie (1851–1891), novelist, was born on 7 June 1851 at Cheetham Hill, Manchester, the eldest child of Thomas Fothergill of Carr End, Wensleydale, Yorkshire, and his wife, Anne, daughter of William and Judith Coultate of Burnley. When she was quite young the family moved to Bowdon in Cheshire, 10 miles from Manchester. Her father came from a long line of yeomen Quakers. His marriage to a non-Quaker forced him to leave the Society of Friends, but he stayed a nonconformist all his life, as did his children. He was engaged in the cotton industry, died in 1866, and shortly after Jessie Fothergill, with her mother, sisters, and brothers, moved to Littleborough, near Rochdale. Jessie was educated first in a small private school in Bowdon, and afterwards for some years at a boarding-school in Harrogate. When her education was completed she lived quietly at Littleborough, studying the life led by the workers in the cotton mills. She paid a first visit to Germany in 1874. On her return to England she published her first novel, Healey, in 1875, and from that time she devoted herself to literary work. In 1877 she achieved a notable success with her third novel, The First Violin, which was begun during a fifteen-month stay in Düsseldorf, where she studied German and music. The novel was first serialized in Temple Bar, and its popularity was the beginning of a career throughout which her ‘price as an author gradually rose to a very respectable £600 a novel’ (Sutherland, 230). Her other works, many of which ran to several editions, included Aldyth (1876), Probation (1879), The Wellfields (1880), Kith and Kin (1881), Made or Marred (1881), One of Three (1881), Peril (1884), Borderland (1886), The Lasses of Leverhouse (1888), From Moor Isles (1888), and A March in the Ranks (1890).

Jessie Fothergill's novels largely depict life on the moorland, in the factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire; but she combined enthusiastic descriptions of the influence of music with the fruits of her observation of the places where her life was mainly spent. ‘Cotton mills and music, manufacturing England and Germany’ were the chief subjects of her pen (Gardiner, 155). Her plots were rather less satisfactorily devised than her studies of character, which were usually subtly and powerfully portrayed; her heroines are ‘strong-minded and socially aware’ (Blain, Clements & Grundy, Feminist comp.).

Jessie Fothergill suffered from a chronic lung complaint, and she often travelled for the sake of her health, largely to avoid British winters. She spent a year in the United States in 1884, and published ‘Some American recollections’ in Temple Bar in February 1886. Her novels also appeared in Indian and Australian journals. She taught herself Italian, and spent the winter of 1890 to 1891 in Rome, which formed the setting of her final novel, Oriole's Daughter (1893); this work centred on the relationship between a republican and his illegitimate daughter. Jessie Fothergill died suddenly at Bern, Switzerland, on 28 July 1891. Her sister, Caroline Fothergill, also wrote novels of a similar nature and quality.

Bertha Porter, rev. Rebecca Mills
Sources

J. Crisp, Jessie Fothergill, 1851–1891 (1980) · H. Speight, Romantic Richmondshire (1897), 477–9 · H. C. Black, Notable women authors of the day (1893), 184–97 · L. Gardiner, ‘Jessie Fothergill's novels’, Novel Review, 21 (May 1892), 153–60 · Blain, Clements & Grundy, Feminist comp. · J. Sutherland, The Longman companion to Victorian fiction (1988) · F. Hays, Women of the day: a biographical dictionary of notable contemporaries (1885), 71–2 · M. Sadleir, XIX century fiction: a bibliographical record based on his own collection, 1 (1951), 133 · W. de la Mare, ‘Women novelists of the 70s’, The eighteen-seventies (1929), 60–63, 72 · The Dial, 1 (1880), 135–6 · J. Fothergill, ‘The first violin’, The international library of famous literature, ed. R. Garnett and others, 20 (1899), 9739–52 · Allibone, Dict. · b. cert.
Likenesses

photograph, repro. in Black, Notable women
Wealth at death

£1121 9s. 6d.: resworn probate, Feb 1892, CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1891)
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Bertha Porter, ‘Fothergill, Jessie (1851–1891)’, rev. Rebecca Mills, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/9978, accessed 17 Oct 2017]

Jessie Fothergill (1851–1891): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/9978

Person TypeIndividual

Last Updated8/7/24

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