Bertha Leith Adams
Bertha Leith Adams, born around 1837 in Cheshire, England, was a novelist and poet whose works were influenced by her experiences living in various locations due to her husband’s military career. After marrying army surgeon Andrew Leith-Adams, she moved with him to places like Dublin, Malta, and Canada, which enriched her creative writing. Adams began her literary career in 1876 with contributions to Charles Dickens's periodical and went on to publish several novels, including the notable three-volume work, *Winstowe*.
In addition to her writing, she was actively involved in education and the arts, particularly during her time as the wife of a school headmaster in Stratford upon Avon. Her poetry collection, *A Song of Jubilee*, published during Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee, reflects the national pride of the era. Despite facing personal tragedies, including the deaths of her sons, Adams continued to write and advocate for women's roles in literature. Although her popularity declined in the 20th century, her prolific output and themes surrounding women's domestic lives and patriotism remain significant in her body of work.
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Bertha Leith Adams
Author
- Born: c. 1837
- Birthplace: Mottram, Longdale, Cheshire, England
- Died: September 5, 1912
Biography
Bertha Leith Adams was born about 1837 in Mottram, Longdale, Cheshire, England, the daughter of a solicitor, Frederick Grundy. In 1859, she married Andrew Leith-Adams, an army surgeon with whose career took his family to Dublin, Malta, and New Brunswick, Canada, locations which informed Bertha Leith Adams’s fiction and may have activated the patriotism which characterized much of her poetry. In 1876, Adams began her publishing career with a story in Charles Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round, where many of her early works found print. The next year she published Winstowe, a three-volume novel, a length she repeated often during her writing life. For the year 1879, she edited Kensington Magazine.
Adams’s husband had retired from the military in 1873 to teach as a professor of zoology at the College of Science in Dublin. Through his teaching and natural history writing and through his membership in the Royal Society, Adams met many important intellectuals of her time, including the biologist Thomas Henry Huxley. She told an early biographer that attending lectures and social activities at Royal Society events provided her with the equivalent of a liberal education, and in fact education became a theme for many of her public lectures later in life.
Adams’s husband died of tuberculosis in 1882, and the following year she married the Reverend Robert Stuart de Courcy Laffan, who became headmaster of the King Edward VIGrammar School in Stratford upon Avon. During their years at the school, Adams was often involved with school theatricals, for which she occasionally wrote both scripts and music. In 1887, for the Jubilee celebration marking Queen Victoria’s fiftieth year on the throne, Adams published her first volume of poetry, A Song of Jubilee, and Other Poems, in which many of the poems celebrated not only Queen Victoria’s achievements but the position of England as an influential world power.
In 1892, Harry, Adams’s younger son by her first husband, died; the following year, Francis, her older son, committed suicide after experiencing a hemorrhage resulting from tuberculosis and throat cancer. Despite these sorrows, the novels Adams published during these years were some of her most popular.
Beginning around 1890, Adams worked actively to promote education for the working class; in addition, she gave a series of lectures on literature. In several, she argued the appropriateness of fiction writing as a career for women. In 1907, she published Poems, a collection of most of her previous verse with some new additions. Although Adams’s popularity faded in the course of the twentieth century, her prolific publication attests to her earlier reputation. The titles of her works, with their frequent references to the lives of women as well as to military life, suggest her interest in using domestic life as material for fiction, and her most popular poetry, A Song of Jubilee, underscores the optimism and patriotism of her time and nation.