Red cloth binding with gilt title and floral decoration on the front board and spine.

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A NEW EDITION OF A POPULAR TALE

Mary Anna Needell (née Lupton, 1830–1922), was a popular English novelist, who usually wrote as Mrs. J. H. Needell. She was born at Vanbrugh Castle, Blackheath, Kent, now divided between the London boroughs of Greenwich and Lewisham. Little has been discovered about her personal background or life.

In a Who’s Who entry in 1907, Mrs Needle stated she was “a student and writer up to the period of marriage; during a long married life of engrossing claims my literary production was suspended, to be resumed in 1881,” i. e. after her husband’s death.

Needell wrote at least twelve novels. They include Catherine Irving (anonymously, 1855), Stephen Ellicott’s Daughter (c. 1880), Julian Karslake’s Secret* (1881),  Lucia, Hugh, and Another* (1884), also published in the United States and telling of “an ‘ideal marriage’ which becomes a painful trap”. The Story of Philip Methuen (1886), said to be her most popular work,  was followed by Noel Chetwynd’s Fall (1888) and then Unequally Yoked (1891), about the marriage of a parson to a woman “beneath him” – called “a very inferior and somewhat unpleasing tale” by The Athenaeum,  but noted in recent times as featuring “a slum girl who grows in stature to match [her husband’s] spirit.” Later came Passing the Love of Women* (1892), The Vengeance of James Vansittart (1895), The Honour of Vivien Bruce (1899) and Unstable as Water (1902). Ada Gresham. An Autobiography (1853) also appears to be fictional. It has “an odd unlikeable heroine and is interesting on birth and supporting a child alone.”

Many novels Needell wrote after her husband’s death reappeared, also in America.  Some critics have noted influence from Charlotte Brontë.  In addition, Needell contributed several short stories in periodicals and annuals. She is not thought to have published anything substantial after 1902.