Ethel Nhill Victoria Stonehouse | |
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Born | Nhill, Victoria, Australia | 1 August 1883
Died | 1 May 1964 Macleod, Victoria, Australia | (aged 80)
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Ethel Nhill Victoria Stonehouse (1 August 1883 – 1 May 1964) was an Australian writer. She wrote under a number of pseudonyms, including Lindsay Russell and Harlingham Quinn.
Stonehouse was born on 1 August 1883 at Nhill in Victoria. She was the fourth child of Jane (née Hardingham) and blacksmith Robert Stonehouse. [1] She attended Charlton State School until she was 14. [2]
Stonehouse's early works were poems and short stories which were published in Australia in The Bulletin, [3] in England in The Spectator and in America in Munsey's Magazine and Smart Set Magazine. [4]
In December 1910 she brought an action for breach of promise of marriage against Michael Francis Quinn, a Roman Catholic priest, seeking £1,000 damages. [5] The matter was dropped in late January 1911. [6]
In 1912, her first book, Smouldering Fires, was published using the pseudonym, Lindsay Russell. Set in the Mallee region of Victoria, the "characters are thinly disguised" [7] and the plot appears to follow the author's personal experience when a priest takes advantage of her, leading to her disgrace. The book was seen as a "severe indictment of celibacy". [7]
In 1912, following the successful sale of nearly 5,000 copies of Smouldering Fires and with a number of other books planned, Stonehouse left Melbourne on the Scharnhorst to visit Italy and other parts of Europe, seeking to recover her health. [8] Smouldering Fires went on to sell 100,000 copies in Australia in eight editions. [1] It and her second book, Love Letters of a Priest, were subject to a papal boycott whereby booksellers were asked to refrain from stocking them. [9] Advocate journalist, Marion Knowles was scathing in her initial review, calling it a "most virulent attack on the Catholic Church" and a "vicious attempt to blacken the character of the priesthood". [10] Later she noted that it had sold 10,000 copies by November 2012. [11]
Stonehouse married medical practitioner John McNaught Scott in Stonehouse, Lanarkshire, Scotland on 23 September 1914. [1] He had treated her for tuberculosis before their marriage. [12]
She spent much of World War I in Ireland, where she continued writing novels. Her final novel, Earthware, was published in 1918. About an unhappy marriage, it appeared to be based on her own experience. [12]
After the War, the couple moved to Australia and lived at Mortlake in Victoria, where her husband worked as a doctor and served as shire president. Her life was, however, stifled in this "intellectually repressed rural town". [12]
Following her husband's death in 1942, [13] Stonehouse became reclusive. In 1949 she was admitted, suffering from "mental enfeeblement", to Mont Park Asylum in the Melbourne suburb of Maclean. [12]
Stonehouse died on 1 May 1964 at Mont Park Asylum and was buried at in the Roman Catholic section of Footscray General Cemetery. [12]