After Mary Elizabeth Braddon's death

This is part of a local history note on Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Start of this local history note.

After her death, Lichfield House continued to be occupied until 1920 by her son, W.B. Maxwell. From 1921 to 1925 it was the home of Col. Sir Henry George Norris and, from 1926, that of Arthur Howitt, a member of the local council who had been Mayor of Richmond in 1924 to 1925. In the mid 1930s the house was demolished and the present block of flats, Lichfield Court, built on the site.

In Miss Braddon’s novels there were several references to the locality in which she lived. Hampton Court and Mortlake are both mentioned in London Pride (1896) and her story The Winning Sequence (published in Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper of December 27^th 1896) was founded on an old legend surrounding Suffield House, Richmond. The house was once said to be haunted by the ghost of a Lady Suffield, who had become insane after the death of her lover in a duel following the discovery of his cheating in a game of cards.

Richmond and Twickenham probably figure most prominently and dramatically in The Conflict (1903). In the scene at the river party given by the wealthy American, Vanessa Stormont:

"Alas! dawn would come too soon, and carriages at half-past four place. Brentford clock chimed the third quarter after one, as the boats passed the fair lawns of Syon House, a sheet of white light, and then plunged into the dark shadow of the trees on the island below Isleworth Ferry, which looked like a home for ghosts.
'I’m sure ghosts live there', said Vanessa; 'the ghost of Pope, perhaps.'
'Pope has an island more convenient to his grave.'
'The Eel Pie, where there’s an inn and people drink beer', cried Vanessa, disgusted. 'No, he would much rather haunt a desert island like that.' 'Too many rats', said her companion."

Later the launches pass under Richmond Bridge and by Buccleuch House "with its river-kissed lawns and the big hotel crowning the wooded hill". The party disembark somewhere in the area of Twickenham, at a brilliantly lit Pavilion and it is then that the murder of Lady Mary Selby, a member of the Party, takes place. Her body is found in a backwater near Montpelier House.

During her lifetime Miss Braddon’s novels were savagely attacked by some critics. These attacks were usually aimed at the moral rather than the literary content of her work, but she also had some influential admirers, not least amongst whom was Queen Victoria herself.

Perhaps the best assessment of her output has been given by Michael Sadleir in the Dictionary of National Biography in a biography published in 1927:

"It is an injustice to regard Miss Braddon as a mere sensationalist. She was a clever, cultivated woman with wide sympathies and interests. Not only was her response to natural beauty always quick and keen (even in her earliest books she showed great power of description alike of landscape and weather-moods), but to the end she was intensely aware of the world and eager to be part of it. This hunger for actuality gives her best work a quality beyond that of mere sensationalism, and to her joyous acceptance of life in every form must be attributed her popularity, not only among the masses but also among her fellow-writers. That her books should have delighted readers so exigent and so diverse as Bulwer, Reade, Thackeray, Sala, Labouchere and Robert Louis Stevenson proves them to be distinct with some quality beyond that of mere dramatic ingenuity."