Author: Elizabeth Elton Smith
Author: Elizabeth Elton Smith (1805–1854)
Biography: Elizabeth Bruce Elton Smith was born in 1805. In 1827, she married Major Freeman Elton Smith, an officer in the East India Company army, in London. The couple had one child, Susan Isabella (d. 1916), who married Thomas Grosvenor Egerton, 2nd Earl of Wilton. From 1828 they lived in India and in 1832 returned to England due to Freeman's health. On their return, Elizabeth wrote The East India Sketch-Book (first part 1832; second part 1833), a collection of sketches, memories, and letters of Anglo-Indian society. She followed these with one novel, The Three Eras of Woman's Life (1836). Thereafter, she abandoned writing. She died in 1854 in Schwetzingen near Heidelberg, Germany.
References: Gentleman's Magazine (September 1854); Rosemany Raza, In Their Own Words: British Women Writers and India 1740–1857 (Oxford University Press, 2006)
Fiction Titles:
- The Three Eras of Woman's Life. 3 vol. London: Bentley, 1836.