Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett

Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett (1846–1930), also known as Mrs George Corbett, was an English feminist writer, best known for her novel New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future (1889).[1][2]

Corbett worked as a journalist for the Newcastle Daily Chronicle and as a popular writer of adventure and society novels.[3] Many of her novels originated as magazine serials and not published in book form.[4]

In June 1889, Mrs Humphry Ward's open letter "An Appeal Against Female Suffrage" was published in The Nineteenth Century with over a hundred other female signatories against the extension of Parliamentary suffrage to women.[5] Inflamed by this "most despicable piece of treachery ever perpetrated towards women by women", Corbett wrote and published New Amazonia.[3]

While New Amazonia was the most explicitly feminist of her novels, it was not the only one to deal with the position of women in society.[6] Her novel When the Sea Gives Up Its Dead (1894) features one of the earliest female detectives in fiction, Annie Cory,[7] and is itself preceded by Adventures of a Lady Detective around 1890, possibly published in a periodical.[8] Her writing was not universally well received, but Hearth and Home listed her along with Arthur Conan Doyle as one of the masters of the art of the detective novel.[6]