At the Circulating Library

Author: Myra Swan

Author: Myra Swan (1870–1949)

Alternate Name(s): Lilian Frances Myra Swan (legal name); Rallywood Cleveland (pseudonym)

Biography: Lilian Frances Myra Swan was born in 1869 in Kings Norton, Worcestershire, the daughter of iron master John George Swan (1839–1900) and Lucie Anne Dawes (herself the daughter of an iron master). She grew up in comfort at her family's estate Upsall Hall in Yorkshire. As a young woman, she turned her hand to fiction beginning with two sporting novels before writing more serious fare. None of her fiction received much notice and the travails to get her final novel published in 1905 drove her to stop writing altogether. She never married and died in 1949 in Yorkshire.

References: British Census (1881, 1891, 1901, 1911)

Fiction Titles:

1. Some Incidents in the Life of a Foxhound: An Autobiography.  1 vol.  York: Sampson Brothers, 1889.
2. First Flight: or, What a Hunting-Crop Saw.  1 vol.  York: John Sampson, 1890.
3. Shallows.  2 vol.  London: Hurst and Blackett, 1894.
4. The Unattainable.  1 vol.  London: Chapman and Hall, 1898.
5. Ballast: A Novel.  1 vol.  London: Longman, 1901.