Broken Trust, A

Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett was born on the 16th August 1846 at Standishgate, near Wigan. After a good education she worked as a journalist for the Newcastle Daily Chronicle and went on to become a widespread and popular writer of adventure and society novels. As a feminist writer it is a little bizarre that she published as Mrs George Corbett. Her most ardent feminist work was ‘New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future,’ though other of her works were also similarly themed and dealt with one of the great issues of the day in Victorian society. She married George Corbett in Sheffield in 1868. They went on to have 4 children, of which only 3 survived. As a writer she was not overly prolific but was perhaps most admired for her female detectives. During her literary career Detective books were all the rage and authors of both sexes attempted to bring new and unusual angles of characters and narratives before the voracious public. Corbett’s first was in a collection of short stories ‘Adventures of a Lady Detective featuring Dora Bell'. A later novel introduced a further detective in the guise of Annie Cory. Elizabeth Corbett died on in 1930.