Annie Hall Cudlip

Annie Hall Cudlip was born Annie Hall Thomas in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, on 25 October 1838, the only daughter of George Thomas, a respected gentleman officer from County Cork, was a lieutenant in the British Royal Navy, who commanded the local Coastguard station.[1][2][3][5][6][7][8] He was the nephew and protégé of Sir Jerry Coghlan. Her mother was the daughter of Captain Alexander Mackey, a Royal Navy cadet of the house of Lord Reay, of Reay Forest.[9]

Her family moved to Morston in Norfolk, where her father served until the year before his death in Greenwich Hospital.[2] Mainly educated at home, Cudlip took up writing about this time and contributed an article, "A Stroll in the Park", to the first issue of London Society. She published her first novel, The Cross of Honour, in 1863 at age 24, following it with the first three-volume novels Sir Victor's Choice and Barry O'Byrnethree months later. The publisher William Tinsley published Denis Donne and Theo Leigh while Chapman & Hall released a series of her three-volume novels, including On Guard, Played Out, Walter Goring, Called to Account, The Dower House, A Passion in Tatters, Blotted Out, A Narrow Escape and Mrs. Cardigan.[2][3][7][9] Many of her earliest were highly controversial and dealt with subjects such as the sexuality of young girls and illegitimate pregnancy.[5] Her work was often compared to that of Florence Marryat, a childhood friend and neighbour.[6]

She was closely associated throughout her career with William Tinsley, who remarked in 1865, after her first two novels had been published by John Maxwell, that she was "a light-hearted girl, and a writer of bright, easy-reading fiction, of which she could write almost acres in a short time. But when she found time to write so much was often a puzzle to me, for she seemed always to be out and about. She was in a bright and merry set at the time, many of whom had 'at homes', dinner parties, dances, and merry meetings of different kinds, including some theatre-going." He claimed that she could easily disgorge one of her "triple-deckers" in six weeks.[5][6][7]

Having refused an offer of marriage from W. S. Gilbert in 1866,[10] she married Rev. Pender Hodge Cudlip on 10 July 1867.[2][3][4][8] they had six children.[9] Rev. Cudlip was a High Church clergyman and amateur theological author.[5] The two lived in Devon for much of their married lives.[6]

However, in 1873, she and her husband moved for eight years to Paddington, London, where she was involved in animal rights groups and wrote of animal cruelty in London during the period. Her favourite Stella setter contracted hydrophobia and eventually had to be destroyed. A large greyhound, Cavac, had been her constant companion for ten years and was one of the many dogs killed in the infamous London dog poisonings in 1876. She had included him as a character in her 1867 novel Called to Account.[5] Two of her elder sons died in March of that year and another in February 1879.[9] Of her three surviving children, one married Major William Price Drury, a Royal Marine, who wrote some nautical novels at the end of the 19th and earlier part of the 20th century.[5]

Between 1876 and 1884, Cudlip was the editor of Ours: A Holiday Quarterly[6] and a regular contributor to All the Year Round, Appleton's Journal, the Broadway,[8] Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly and other magazines in Britain and the United States. She also wrote serial novels for The Ladies' Pictorial and a group of other provincial journals.[9] She and her husband returned to Devon in 1884, where Pender Cudlip would serve as Vicar of Sparkwell for 25 years.[1][3] She continued writing single-volume novels for such publishers as Chatto & Windus around the start of the 20th century.[7] However, she began experiencing financial problems within a few years and applied to the Royal Literary Fund in 1907 and 1908. In the latter year, she claimed that the highest offer she had received for her latest novel was £15.[6] Her husband died in 1911 and Annie Cudlip died seven years later on 24 November 1918.

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent & Sons – via Wikisource.

• McGowan, Marjorie E. Annie Thomas Cudlip, 1838-1918: A Bio-Bibliography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1968.

• Works by or about Annie Hall Cudlip at Internet Archive
• Works by Pender/Annie Cudlip at Google Books (scanned books)