Bertha Thomas

Bertha Thomas (19 March 1845 – 24 August 1918), was a Victorian pro-feminist writer, author of the 1880 novel The Violin Player.

Life

Thomas was born on 19 March 1845 at Shelsley Beauchamp in Worcestershire.[1] Her father was Canon John Thomas (died 1883), and her sisters were the composer Florence Ashton Marshall and the professional clarinettist Frances Thomas.[2]

She moved to London in the 1880s, initially living with her father and her sister Frances at 16 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, until the father's death in 1883.[3] She completed seven novels, many of which were serialized in London Society, and which became popular in the circulating libraries.[4] There were also short stories, other writings and articles that were published in periodicals in the UK and the US.[5] A collection of her short stories was re-issued in 2008.[6] Like her sister Frances, Bertha remained unmarried.

Work

The 1880 novel The Violin-Player has been described as "perhaps the most triumphant narrative of female musicality in Victorian literature".[2] Her 1875 booklet Latest Intelligence from the Planet Venus, first published in Fraser’s Magazine, presented a satirical argument against giving women the vote. In The Son of the House (1900), a mother imprisons her son under the guise of insanity to protect the family inheritance - a subversion of The Madwoman in the Attic Victorian trope of an insane woman controlled by her male relatives.[3]

Thomas also wrote the libretto for her sister Florence's operetta Prince Sprite in 1891, published by Novello.[7]

Bibliography

  • Proud Maisie, novel (published anonymously, 1877)
  • Cressida, novel (1878)
  • The Violin-Player, novel (1880)
  • In a Cathedral City (1882)
  • Life of Richard Wagner (Elzevir Library, 1883, translation of biography by Carl Friedrich Glasenapp)
  • Famous Women: George Sand (Eminent Women Series, 1883, rev. 1889)
  • Ichabod: A Portrait, novel (1885)
  • Elizabeth's Fortune, novel (1887)
  • Famous or Infamous, novel (1890)
  • Sundorne, novel (1890)
  • The House on the Scar: A Tale of South Devon (1890)
  • Camera Lucida: or, Strange Passages in Common Life, short stories (1897)
  • The Son of the House, novel (1900)
  • Picture Tales from the Welsh Hills, short stories (1912) (reprinted as Stranger Within The Gates (2008)

References

  1. ^ Thomas, Bertha (2008). Bohata, Kirsti (ed.). Stranger within the Gates: Short stories. Honno. p. iv. ISBN 9781870206945. Retrieved 14 October 2025.
  2. ^ a b Shannon Draucker. Sounding Bodies: Acoustical Science and Musical Erotics in Victorian Literature (2024)
  3. ^ a b Bertha Thomas biography, Pascal Theatre Company
  4. ^ Bassett, Troy J. "Author: Bertha Thomas." in At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837—1901
  5. ^ Kirsti Bohata. 'Bertha Thomas: the New Woman and ‘Anglo-Welsh’ hybridity', in New Woman Hybridities, Routledge (2004)
  6. ^ Bertha Thomas. Stranger Within the Gates (Honno, 2008)
  7. ^ 'Florence Ashton Marshall 1843-1922', Salon Without Boundaries, 21 September 2022
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