Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes

Personal life

Born in George Street, Marylebone, London, and raised in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France, Belloc was the only daughter of French barrister Louis Belloc and English feminist Bessie Parkes. Her younger brother was Hilaire Belloc, whom she wrote of in her last work, The Young Hilaire Belloc (published posthumously in 1956).

Belloc's paternal grandfather was the French painter Jean-Hilaire Belloc, and her maternal great-great-grandfather was the theologian/philosopher Joseph Priestley. Her father died in 1872 when she and her brother were very young. Her mother spent 53 years as a widow and died in 1925.

In 1896, Belloc married Frederick Sawrey A. Lowndes (1868–1940), a journalist. They had one son and two daughters, the elder of whom married the Earl of Iddesleigh. Unlike her brother she was a strong supporter of the women's suffrage movement. In 1913 she was the President of the Women Writers' Suffrage League which included men as members. She got on with her brother but it was remembered that he lent her £350 in 1914 to pay off her debts.

Career

She published a biography, H.R.H. The Prince of Wales: An Account of His Career, in 1898. A legacy given to her husband provided £2,000 which was used to support them while she tried to make a living from writing. She wrote about seventy novels, reminiscences and plays at the rate of one per year until 1946. An early novel was The Heart of Penelope, which was published in 1904.

She produced over forty novels in all — mainly mysteries, well-plotted and on occasion based on real-life crimes, though she herself resented being classed as a crime writer. She created the French detective Hercules Popeau, maybe before Agatha Christie's creation of Belgian detective Hercule Poirot. Popeau appeared in two novels and a series of short stories, creating some confusion when both had works called "The Labours of Hercules".

In the memoir, I, Too, Have Lived in Arcadia, published in 1942, 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. A second autobiography Where love and friendship dwelt appeared in 1943.

Ernest Hemingway praised her insight into female psychology, revealed above all in the situation of the ordinary mind failing to cope with the impact of the extraordinary.

Death

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

Adaptations

Film

Her most famous novel, The Lodger (1913), based on the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888, has been adapted for the screen several times; the first version was Alfred Hitchcock's silent film The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927). The second was Maurice Elvey's (1932), followed by John Brahm's (1944), Hugo Fregonese's Man in the Attic (1953), and David Ondaatje's (2009).

Her novel Letty Lynton (1931) was the basis for the 1932 film of the same name starring Joan Crawford.

Her novel The Story of Ivy (1927) was adapted as Ivy (1947) starring Joan Fontaine.

Opera

The Lodger is a 1960 opera by Phyllis Tate, based on the 1913 novel,

Radio

Hitchcock directed an adaptation of The Lodger for CBS in 1940 which served as the first episode of the radio drama series Suspense.

A further radio version of The Lodger was produced by the BBC in 2003.

The Story of Ivy was adapted for a 1945 episode of the CBS radio series Suspense.