Getting published has never been easy. Even the most celebrated authors once faced rejection after rejection. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter was turned down by a dozen publishing houses before one finally took a chance. Anne Frank’s diary was dismissed by fifteen publishers before it reached the world. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind met with thirty-eight rejections, and Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was rejected an astonishing 121 times before becoming a classic beloved by millions. The lesson, we are told, is persistence and, above all, patience.
But in the early years of the 20th century, one little-known writer, when faced with resistance from her publisher, decided to act in a shocking manner. Edith Allonby, a schoolteacher from Lancaster, published two strange and ambitious novels at the beginning of the 20th century. Her fiction was suffused with allegory, spiritual yearning, and cosmic settings. But her works gained little notice. In 1905, convinced that her writing would never be appreciated during her lifetime, she swallowed poison in the hope that her death would ensure her third novel received the attention she believed it deserved.
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Her gamble worked only partly. Newspapers briefly covered the circumstances of her suicide, and her final book was issued soon afterward. But the attention did not translate into fame. Instead, Miss Allonby’s story became less about her art and more about the tragic desperation of a young woman who gave her life for her writing.
Edith Allonby was born in 1875 in Cark, Cumbria, England. She lost her mother when she was only four, and her father when she was thirteen. When she was seven, her family moved to Liverpool, where she completed her education. At first, she worked as a mistress at a school in Bishopsbourne, Kent. Later, she joined St. Anne's National School in Lancaster as headmistress of the Girls’ Department. Miss Allonby was a devoted and loving teacher. The children adored her, becoming well-behaved, obedient, and attentive in class. In just two years, she transformed the Lancaster school into a prosperous institution, earning grants and receiving favorable reports. One inspector wrote in a report that Miss Allonby’s influence had brought the school “from darkness into light.”
Outside the classroom, she was devoted to writing, pouring her imagination into novels that fused adventure with moral and philosophical questions. In 1903, Miss Allonby published her first novel, Jewell Sowers, followed two years later by Marigold. Both novels, published anonymously, are set on a fictional planet named “Lucifram,” where everything is upside down—from trees, houses, and oceans to rivers and mountains. Even Lucifram’s inhabitants walked on their heads. A reviewer of Jewell Sowers, writing for The Guardian in 1904, observed that the book was “an experiment in fantasy, and none the less pleasant on that account.” The review continued: “The book is lightly written, bright, and entertaining, and almost every character introduced is neatly characterised.”
In 1905, the same year Marigold was published, Allonby completed the manuscript of her third and final novel—The Fulfilment. Its preface began with the words: “DEDICATED TO GOD. With all the reverence and fear of which the human heart is capable.” The Fulfilment was filled with religious fantasies that challenged certain dogmas, traditions, and preconceived ideas. Allonby insisted that she had received these instructions from God and believed it was her duty to present them to the world unexpurgated.
Her publisher, however, refused to issue the book unless certain passages were removed—sections they feared would offend the religious public and irreparably damage Miss Allonby’s reputation.
The feelings and the wishes of the living and Miss Allonby’s reputation had to be considered. Certain pages of her book contained references to holy things and persons turned in such a way that they seemed flippant, irreverent, even ridiculous, and they were undoubtedly not literature in any sense; No possible good could come of giving such pages to the world.
The publishers communicated this to Miss Allonby, but she refused—she wanted the book to be published word for word as she wrote it.
“When I first wrote The Fulfilment I longed to see it published, that I might fight the battle for it with my pen,” Miss Allonby wrote to her publisher. “But as the time went by, after it was returned to me, I began to realise slowly what a terrible book I had written, as well as beautiful and true, and it seemed as if it called for all I had to give as an expiation before it could go free. I put it away—the book and the thought. But I began to write ever on the same theme—the revelation Heaven had given me.... And then on Whitsunday the voice awoke me that I must bring my
greatest treasure forward once again.”
When Miss Allonby realized she couldn’t have the book published her way, she did the unthinkable—she took her own life, by drinking carbolic acid on 5 September 1905. She was only 29 years old.
In a written statement which was published in The London Standard, Miss Allonby said:
I have written a book (I wrote it four years since) which contains one of either two things-truth or page upon page of blasphemy. I know it to be truth, but so simple that the world can hardly recognize it, and while I stand in the light I am afraid it cannot be seen at all. When I am gone, and when it once has a fair chance of being read and discussed as it deserves to be, it will appear different from what it ever could, do with me living. No book was ever written by human hand more reverently or with great purity of thought. I tried to publish it but failed. Since then I have gone on writing patiently and spending money willingly with the one end in view of making an opening for it, but I am afraid, so far as it is concerned, I am as near to it as I was four years since. Had 'The Fulfillment' been less near to God and less sacred to me, I had fought for it well with earthly weapons, but it was given to me out of the great silence, and I must give it to the world the same. That is the simple, honest truth of the whole matter. I have died to give God's gift to the world with as little stumbling block as possible.
Miss Allonby’s death came as a terrible shock to her publishers, for just as her previous two books—Jewell Sowers and Marigold—had been revised before appearing in print, they had expected her to consent to the same necessary revisions in the case of The Fulfilment. There was no question about the book being published, and a date had even been agreed upon—December 1, Miss Allonby’s birthday. The publishers were simply waiting for her letter of consent to the revisions when the lamentable tragedy occurred.
A few months after her death, The Fulfilment was published with the offending passages removed, rendering her sacrifice in vain. The publishers expressed regret that her work had to be issued in “an incomplete and unrevised state,” adding that “had Miss Edith Allonby lived, there is no doubt that the story would have been considerably altered and improved before being put into print.”
Although Edith Allonby’s story is striking because of the unusual circumstances of her death, it is also significant for the particular genre in which she wrote. Science fiction and fantasy had traditionally been dominated by men, though women had forayed into speculative fiction from the very beginning. Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World, published in the 17th century, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) are notable early examples. By the 1940s, the science fiction genre had reached its peak, yet only 10 to 15 percent of its authors were women. In the early Edwardian period, when Miss Allonby lived, their presence was rarer still. Notably, in the same era, Bengali writers such as Begum Roquia Sakhawat Hussain—author of Sultana’s Dream—and Sukumar Ray were producing celebrated works of feminist science fiction.
Miss Allonby, however, was deeply religious, and her violent final act inevitably raises questions about her mental health. According to activist Vicci McCann, a letter from the family doctor to the coroner suggested a history of insanity in the family. The doctor stated that Edith’s father and his brother had both committed suicide, and that her sister had also attempted to take her own life. Miss Allonby, however, insisted to her publisher that she was not mad. In her final letter, she wrote: “If they say I’m mad, tell them from me it’s a madness that will spread—not the suicide but the belief.”
References:
# “AN AUTHOR'S SUICIDE.; Strange Story of Miss Allonby's Unpublished Book”. The New York Times
# Edith Allonby. “The Fulfilment”
# “The Fulfilment and the tragic tale of Edith Allonby”. Newsletter of Lancashire Archives
# “New Novels”. The Guardian, Wed, Feb 24, 1904
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