Ethel M. Dell

(Ethel May Dell)

In This Collection

Other Works by Ethel M. Dell

  • The Knave of Diamonds (1913)
  • The Rocks of Valpré (1914)
  • The Bars of Iron (1916)
  • The Hundredeth Chance (1917)
  • The Rose of Dawn (1917)
  • Greatheart (1918)
  • The Desire of His Life (1920)
  • The Top of the World (1920)
  • The Obstacle Race (1921)
  • The Knight-Errant (1922)
  • Charles Rex (1922)
  • Verses (1923)
  • The Unknown Quantity (1924)
  • The Black Knight (1926)
  • The Gate Marked Private (1928)
  • Storm Drift (1930)
  • The Silver Bride (1932)
  • Storm Drift (1930)
  • Dona Celestis (1933)
  • The Prison Wall (1933)
  • The Electric Torch (1934)
  • The Juice of the Pomegranate (1938)
  • Sown Among Thorns (1939)
Curlicue

Dell, Ethel May, 1881—1939, popular novelist and short-story writer, da. of Irene (Parrott), a Protestant, and Victor D., an ex-Catholic who worked in life assurance. B. in Brixton, she lived at various places near London. She wrote tales (of knights errant) while her mother was teaching her and her dominating elder sister at home, then for schoolmates at Streatham College for Girls, 1893—8; her father had some privately printed. She sent work to magazines in 1900; next year she tried to place a novel, rejected an inadequate offer for three stories, and had her first acceptances from Red Magazine and the Universal and Ludgate Magazine. (Some cousins at once began counting her uses of ‘passion’, ‘tremble’, ‘pant’, and ‘thrill’.) Her characteristic first novel, The Way of an Eagle, collected 13 rejections (probably as too risqué for a woman) in many drafts before appearing in 1912, an instant bestseller, repr. 27 times by 1915. Its scapegrace hero promises the heroine’s father (commander of an Indian frontier fort where whites are about to be overwhelmed by ‘a host of dark’) that he will save her honour by shooting her if necessary, but instead rescues her and wins her after many vicissitudes. Disturbed by her ‘sudden wealth’, EMD gave most of it to her family. She wrote about 20 more novels (The Knave of Diamonds, 1913, was dramatized in 1921), eight books of stories, and one of verse, and married Lt.-Col. G. T. Savage in 1922. Her code is simple (courage Empire, and protection of women, ‘the first primaeval instinct of human chivalry’) and classbound (heroines bear ‘the unmistakable stamp of high breeding in every delicate movement’), her style cliché-ridden. Male sexuality is steamily hinted at (she was forbidden to nice girls like Nancy Mitford) and often violent (‘great purple welts crossed and re-crossed each other on the livid features’), but idealizing love triumphs. By critics she was ‘much derided’, as Stevie Smith wrote in defending her, 1958. Many works were condensed by Barbara Cartland in the 1970s and 1980s. Life by her adoptive niece Penelope D., 1977.

— The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. New Haven: Yale UP. p. 280.

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Obituary

Miss Ethel M. Dell who died on Sunday, was an author whose novels at the height of her success were probably more widely read than those of any other writer of fiction unless an exception can be made of Edgar Wallace. Even though her books could never have appealed to readers of literary discrimination the name of Ethel M. Dell has its place in memories of the period of the last War and the years that immediately preceded and followed it. Her first book “The Way of an Eagle” was only published after many publishers had refused it, but when it appeared in 1912 it quickly placed Miss Dell among the best-selling writers of fiction. “The Knave of Diamonds” which followed it in 1913 “The Rocks of Valpré” (1914), “The Keeper of the Door” (1915), and many subsequent novels repeated in a large measure the author's first success, and when “Greatheart” appeared in 1918 the first edition numbered 75,000 copies. In more recent years the popularity of Miss Dell's novels declined, but she continued to write, her last books being “Honeyball Farm” (1937) and “The Juice of the Pomegranate” (1938)

Even in the days of her greatest popularity Miss Dell was known personally to few people outside her own immediate circle. In 1922 she married Lieutenant-Colonel G. T. Savage D.S.O.

— Times Literary Supplement. Saturday, Sept. 23, 1939.