Author: Harriet Raikes
Author: Harriet Raikes (1809–1890)
Biography: Harriet Raikes was born in 1809 in London, the daughter of famous dandy Thomas Raikes (1777–1848) and West Indian heiress Sophia Bayly. Her grandfather was merchant and banker Thomas Raikes (1741–1813). Given her family, her life was one of wealth and privilege. Rather late in life, she wrote a single novel, The Marriage Contract (1849), about an Anglo-French heiress accused of murder. The novel's plot anticipates several tropes of the later sensation fiction of the 1860s. Raikes only other literary work was the editing and publishing of her father's diary. She never married and died in 1890 in Versailles.
References: DNB (Thomas Raikes, Thomas Raikes)
Fiction Titles:
- The Marriage Contract. 2 vol. London: Bentley, 1849.