Rosa Nouchette Carey's Biography(Books)(Photos)

Rosa Nouchette Carey was born in London and
grew up in Hackney. She was the 8th child and

after the death of their father - a situation
with some autobiographical connections.

4th daughter of a ship broker, William Henry
Carey and his wife Maria Jane Wooddill (or

Woodhill). She attended the Ladies' Institute
in St John's Wood and retained from girlhood

the condition and anxieties of woman in her
roles of mother, daughter, sister. Characters

her High Church principles.

"without a single redeeming vice" as one
commentator put it. Nevertheless, the

As a child she entertatined her siblings with
improvised tales, wrote plays and poetry and

narrative voice in several of her novels such
as Only the Governess and Herb of Grace is

started a magazine.

male. However, he is only there to highlight
the female characters.

Her first published novel, Nellie's Memories
(1868) was met with reviews that sneered at

As well as novels Rosa N Carey wrote short

this babblingly autobiographical chronicle of
an elder sister ("a weak girl of one and

twenty") heroically replacing her dead
mother. However, it sold over 50,000 copies.

(RTS), and serials for the Girl's Own Paper.
She also had one book, Heriot's Choice

As a girl she had "made a deliberate and as

it afterwards proved, a fruitless attempt to
quench the longing to write" and had

fiction shows the clear influence of Ms Yonge
who was the most famous popular High Church

"endeavoured to be more like other girls". As
a woman of the 19th century with High Church

female novelist.

beliefs it would have been very difficult for
her to justify working for a living, or at

Under the pseudonym of "Le Voleur" Rosa N
Carey did produce a number of slightly racier

least writing (which was not woman's work)
without the necessity for it. However, her

novels including For Love of a Bedouin Maid
(1897).

brother died leaving her the sole support of
his six children. This left her with a free

She lived in Hampstead for 39 years and then

conscience but "The charge tied my
hands...and prevented the pursuing of my

literary labours as fully as I could
otherwise have done".

mother, then of various of her siblings and
their children. She was a close friend of the

She wrote around 40 domestic melodramas. Her

writer Mrs Henry Wood and whilst in Putney
she shared her house for some of the time

best received novel was Not Like Other Girls
published in 1884, in which three daughters

with the children's writer Helen Marion
Burnside.