Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler (9 April 1860 – 22 June 1929) was an English author of popular romances, and a poet and children's writer. She was a keen Methodist.
The elder daughter of Henry Hartley Fowler, 1st Viscount Wolverhampton, a Wesleyan MP, and his wife Ellen Thorneycroft, Ellen was born at Chapel Ash, Wolverhampton, on 9 April 1860. Her younger sister, Edith Henrietta Fowler (16 February 1865 – 18 November 1944), also wrote novels and a biography of her father.[1]
On 16 April 1903, Ellen married Alfred Felkin, a senior teacher at the Royal Naval School at Mottingham near Eltham.[2] She died on 22 June 1929 in Westbourne, Dorset.[3]
Fowler became a member of the Writers' Club and the Women's Athenaeum Club. She was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.[1]
Fowler's earliest volumes were Verses Grave and Gay (1891) and Verses Wise and Otherwise (1895), which were followed by a volume of short stories.[3] Further poetry came in Love's Argument and Other Poems (1905). Of her romances, a present-day commentator has noted, "Fowler unusually combined Methodism with high society..., which proved popular despite leaving the critics cold."[4] Fame came first with Concerning Isabel Carnaby (1898), then A Double Thread (1899), The Farringdons (1900), Fuel of Fire (1902), Place and Power (1903), Kate of Kate Hall (1904), In Subjection (1906),[4] Miss Fallowfield's Fortune (1908), The Wisdom of Folly (1910), Her Ladyship's Conscience (1913),[5] Ten Degrees Backward (1915), Beauty and Bands (1920) The Lower Pool (1923) and Signs and Wonders (1926).[3][6]
Fowler's sister, Edith Henrietta Fowler, wrote two successful novels for children: The Young Pretenders (1895) and The Professor's Children (1897), and also The Man with Transparent Legs – Twenty six ideal stories for girls (1899).
The first of these was republished in London by Persephone Books in 2007,[7][8] in view of its "sophistication, humour and ironies" of interest to both children and adults.[3][9]