Beatrice Harraden

Beatrice Harraden (24 January 1864 – 5 May 1936) was a British novelist, playwright and suffragette. She was a founding member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and a member of the Women Writers Suffrage League. She published writing in the Votes for Women newspaper and novels. Her most successful work was Ships That Pass in the Night (1893).

Life

Harraden was born in Hampstead, London on 24 January 1864, to parents Samuel Harraden, a Cambridge-educated businessman who exported musical instruments to British India, and Rosalie Lindstedt Harraden, an Anglo-Indian woman. Harraden grew up to become an influential feminist writer and suffragette. She studied at Cheltenham Ladies' College in Gloucestershire, as well as at Queen's College and Bedford College in London. In 1883, she received her BA degree as well as an honours degree in Classics and Mathematics, which would have been a noteworthy feat for a woman in this era.

Harraden suffered lifelong illness which included a severe case of diphtheria and damage to her ulnar nerve as a result of playing the violoncello. In the early 1890s, she tried the rest cure at Menton on the French Riviera; took the Alpine Cure at a sanitarium in Davos, Switzerland; and experimented with hydrotherapy at a spa in Harrogate in the West Riding of Yorkshire, among other efforts to recover her health.

Her experience in the Alps resulted in her first novel Ships That Pass in the Night (1893), a best-seller which sold over one million copies. The love story set in a tuberculosis sanatorium, follows protagonist, Bernadine, an independent teacher, writer and activist, who falls in love with Robert, the Disagreeable man. After recovering and leaving the sanatorium, Bernadine returns to England. The popular novel ends rather tragically with Bernadine dying suddenly in a traffic accident. Though Harraden continued her career as a writer, she failed to achieve similar success with subsequent books which included novels, short stories and books for children.

Harraden spent several summer holidays lodging at The Green Dragon inn at Little Stretton, Shropshire, walking and writing. Her memories of this and the landlady, a Mrs Benbow, led to her writing a short story, At the Green Dragon, published in 1894.

In 1894, Harraden travelled to the United States to visit British friends John and Agnes Kendall in San Diego, California. On her arrival in the New York, she was greeted as a celebrity and sought out by influential literary people. She recovered her health on a lemon ranch in the El Cajon Valley and in the seaside resort of La Jolla, returning to San Diego several times during the late 1890s. Her experience led to the production of Two Health Seekers in Southern California (1897) with Dr. William A. Edwards, and Hilda Strafford and The Remittance Man: Two California Stories (1897).

Harraden was both a leader of the suffragette movement and a founding member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), befriending new members like Helen Craggs, and she was also an integral member of the Women Writers' Suffrage League and Women's Tax Resistance League.

Unlike the WSPU, who only welcomed women as members, the Women Writers Suffrage League welcomed men, women and members from diverse political parties. The only dictate for membership to the Writer's League, other than having been paid for a literary work, was support of the suffragette cause. These writers were agitators demanding access to the male dominated civic and social institutions, but they used their pens to influence society's social scene and the theatre. Harraden therefore turned to this group as the WSPU became increasingly militant and exclusive.

She published her work in the suffragette paper Votes for Women and travelled extensively in Europe and the United States due to her involvement in the women's movement. This included Holiday Campaigns in the Lake District for Liverpool WSPU organiser Alice Davies, which she took part in with the Australian suffragette Vida Goldstein. She also involved herself as a reader for the Oxford English Dictionary, and this, too is reflected in her fiction: The Scholar's Daughter (1906) is set among lexicographers.

In 1930, she received a Civil List pension for her literary work. She died at Barton-on-Sea, Hampshire, on 5 May 1936, aged 72.