Charlotte O'Conor Eccles

Charlotte O'Conor Eccles was born in County Roscommon, Ireland, on 1 November 1863, the fourth daughter of Alexander O'Conor Eccles of Ballingard House, the founder of a home-rule newspaper, The Roscommon Messenger.[2] She attended a Catholic grammar school, Upton Hall School FCJ, near Birkenhead and convents in Paris and Germany.[3]

Eccles later lived in London with her mother and sister, where after a number of setbacks she became a journalist in the London office of the New York Herald. She went on to become a staff member of the Daily Chronicle and the Star.[4] She commented in an article in the June 1893 number of Blackwoods Magazine on "the immense difficulty a woman finds in getting into an office in any recognised capacity."[3]

Eccles joined the agricultural reformer Sir Horace Plunkett in writing and lecturing around Ireland for the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction.[4] Another of her Blackwoods Magazine articles, in December 1888, covered "Irish Housekeeping and Irish Customs in the Last Century."[3]

Her first novel, The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore (London: Jarrold & Sons, 1897), was published in 1897 under the male pseudonym Hal Godfrey: "This hilarious novel tells of a middle-aged woman who drinks too much of an elixir of youth, causing pandemonium in the... boarding-house where she lives with her sister."[3] She also contributed to a number of periodicals, including the Irish Monthly, the Pall Mall Magazine, the American Ecclesiastical Review and the Windsor Magazine.

Eccles's other books include Aliens of the West (London: Cassell, 1904) and The Matrimonial Lottery (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1906).[5] An obituary in The Times described Aliens of the West as "one of the best modern books of short stories on Ireland yet written."[1]

Eccles died in 1911 at her home in St John's Wood, London of cerebral thrombosis,[6] after a reported nervous breakdown.