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At the Circulating Library

A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901

A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901

Author: Una Ashworth Taylor

Author: Una Ashworth Taylor (1857–1922)

Biography: Una Ashworth Taylor was born in 1857 in London, the middle daughter of Sir Henry Taylor (1800–1886) and Theodosia Alice Spring-Rice (d. 1891), herself the daughter of Lord Monteagle. Her father was a poet, author of Philip Van Arteveide (1834), and civil servant in the colonial department. The household was "pre-eminently a happy one" and the host of dozens of literary and artistic celebrities including Julia Cameron, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dodgson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and G. F. Watts (who painted her mother). She wrote seven novels beginning with Wayfarers (1886) and other miscellaneous works. Her two older sisters, Eleanor Ashworth Towle and Ida Ashworth Taylor, also wrote novels. For thirty years she shared a small house in Montpelier Square with her unmarried sister Ida where the sisters "received their many friends and conducted a literary salon, of which the characteristic notes were intellectual interest and Irish warmheartedness." She never married and died in 1922 in Brighton. Her obituary recalled "a lady of high accomplishment, as well as of rare social charm and independence of character" and "a learned and enthusiastic musician, while among art-embroiderers she had probably few, if any, equals in the country."

Author Tags:

References: British Census (1881); DNB (Sir Henry Taylor); Times (24 June 1922; 22 October 1929)

Fiction Titles:

  1. Wayfarers: A Novel.  2 vol.  Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1886.
  2. The City of Sarras.  1 vol.  Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1887.
  3. Knight Asrael and Other Stories.  1 vol.  London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1889.
  4. The King's Favourite.  2 vol.  London: Methuen, 1892.
  5. Nets for the Wind.  1 vol.  London: John Lane, 1896.
  6. Early Italian Love Stories, Taken from the Originals.  1 vol.  London: Longman, 1899.