ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Missing Sewell (1815-1906) was born in Newport on the Isle of Wight, one of twelve children of a solicitor, Thomas Sewell (d. 1842), and his wife, Jane Edwards. Her Autobiography (1907), which she says was written at her mother's request to continue a history of the family Jane Sewell had begun, is dominated by allusions to her brothers, who were distinguished, but troublesome, involving their unmarried sisters in care of their motherless children. The death of one sister-in-law, Lucy, in 1844, brought one such group of children on to their hands. Her brother, William Sewell (1804—74), Warden of New College, Oxford, and founder of Radley College, turned out to be a bad businessman, like his father, who left the family in debt. Edwards, Warden of New College, once claimed: 'My sister Elizabeth is not remarkable in any way'. In fact, she was a successful High Church novelist, whose career was launched with Amy Herbert (1844), and pursued with Laneton Parsonage (1846-48) and The Experience of Life (1853), based on her own childhood: 'Sarah's troubled mind was a record of my own personal feelings', she comments on her heroine (Autobiography, p. 115). Sewell never married, but established a girls' school at Ventnor in 1866. Much of the childhood section of her Autobiography is concerned with her own school experiences.
