ABSTRACT
Lucy Be this Walford (née Colquhoun; 1845-1915) was a novelist, born at Portobello near Edinburgh, daughter of a former army officer, sportsman and author. She was educated at home and in 1869 married Alfred Saunders Walford with whom she had two sons and five daughters. Beginning to write secretly, she went on to publish forty-five books, of which the first, Mr Smith: A Part of his Life (1874) attracted the admiration of Queen Victoria whom Walford was then invited to meet. She also contributed to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (which was where her writing career began), and to the New York Critic as London correspondent. Walford was keenly interested in the evolving canon of women writers, and produced biographies of Jane Taylor, Hannah More and Mary Somerville, besides two autobiographic memoirs, Recollections of a Scottish Novelist (1910) and Memories of Victorian London (1912).
