Writer, journalist.

1 November 1863 – 1911

Charlotte O’Conor Eccles: A tribute by Joanne Shattock

Charlotte O’Conor Eccles (c1864-1911) was one of the pioneers of women’s journalism in the late nineteenth century and one of the few to leave behind a candid account of the challenges faced by the novice. Finding that writing for magazines and reviews did not generate enough to live on, she moved to London from her native Ireland in the early 1880s in order to ‘penetrate the magic circle’ of the London daily newspapers. Her choice of career was not surprising. Her father Alexander O’Conor Eccles was the founder of the Roscommon Messenger (1848-1935), a paper which supported Irish Home Rule, a cause which his daughter also espoused. Educated at Upton Hall, a boarding school near Birkenhead, and then at convents in Germany and France, O’Conor Eccles had a command of several European languages. A convent education, however, as she was later to reflect, was ‘not the kind of training that makes one enjoy facing the world’.  More precisely, it had not prepared her for the abrasive and masculine world of Fleet Street. Settling initially into a boarding house in Bloomsbury she sought interviews with various editors to whom she was given letters of introduction but soon realised that these were worthless. She was promised engagements which did not materialise, tricked into writing copy for which she was not paid, and on one occasion was asked to make a financial contribution to a journal so that her work might be published. On another she made a hasty exit from an interview with a young editor after the conversation became uncomfortably personal, only to learn later that he had a reputation for making advances to female interviewees. She eventually found work in the London office of the New York Herald where a sympathetic editor taught her the rudiments of newspaper writing and became a mentor. She worked on the Daily Chronicle and on the Star, for which she wrote a syndicated letter, acted as the London correspondent of several provincial newspapers and was for a time a freelance journalist. She also wrote for the Irish Monthly from 1886 to 1905. 

O’Conor Eccles recalled her initiation into journalism in a revealing article entitled ‘The Experiences of a Woman Journalist’ published anonymously in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (June 1893). ‘One is horribly handicapped in being a woman’ she concluded, pondering the famous journalist T. P. O’Connor’s advice to ‘Go as an office-boy if need be, but get into an office anyhow.’  ‘The immense difficulty a woman finds in getting into an office in any recognized capacity makes a journalistic beginning far harder for her than for a man’, she wrote. 

Her experience was a textbook example of what the novelist Arnold Bennett later observed in his Journalism for Women: a Practical Guide (1898). Bennett acknowledged that women journalists found the ultra-masculine world of the newspaper office intimidating and off-putting but advised them to persist in seeking interviews with influential editors and not be discouraged when their work was at first rejected.  More significantly, he warned would-be female journalists against confining themselves to ‘women’s subjects’ but rather to cover as broad a range of topics as possible.

Much of Charlotte O’Conor Eccles’s career reflected that advice.   Social issues in Ireland preoccupied her early years. She wrote and lectured for the Board of Agriculture and Technical Instruction, working with the agricultural reformer Horace Plunkett in his efforts to improve the condition of Irish tenant farmers. An article in the Nineteenth Century, ‘The Hospital where the Plague Broke Out’ (October 1899) revealed the shocking condition of patients in a Vienna hospital, particularly women, and was another example of her crusading zeal as a journalist. Because of the anonymity which prevailed in newspaper writing until the end of the nineteenth century the full extent and range of O’Conor Eccles’s journalism remains to be discovered. Despite her early achievements, according to a fellow journalist, she ‘drifted entirely into the background following the uprise of the New Woman’s agitation’ (New Ireland Review, March 1895).

She had some success as a novelist, notably with The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore (1897) written under the pseudonym Hal Godfrey, a comic novel about a middle-aged woman who overindulges in a rejuvenating elixir.  Another novel, The Matrimonial Lottery (1906) was published under her own name.  Her collection of short stories, Aliens of the West (1904) about the claustrophobic life in a small town in Ireland was described by the Daily Chronicle as ‘one of the best modern books of short stories on Ireland’.  She published a translation of the Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Peasants in Exile in 1899.  

O’Conor Eccles was a Fellow of the Institute of Journalists and a member of the Writers’ Club, an organisation for professional women writers, whose practical support she acknowledged in the Blackwood’s article. She died at her home in Alexander Road, St John’s Wood after a long illness aged 47.  The Times obituary (15 June 1911) described her as ‘one of the best known and best loved women in literary society’.

Joanne Shattock, University of Leicester.

References

Arnold E. Bennett,  Journalism for Women. A Practical Guide (John Lane. The Bodley Head, 1898).

The Feminist Companion to Literature in English ed. Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy (Batsford, 1990)

McGuire, J. and Quinn, J eds, Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge, 2009) DOI: https://doi.org/10.3318/dib.002874.v1

Lorna Sage, ed. Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English (Cambridge, 1999).

The Times 15 June 1911

1891 Census

Joanne Shattock is Emeritus Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leicester.  Her books include the Oxford Guide to British Women Writers (1993), as editor, the Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature vol. 3 1800-1900 (2000), Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge 2017) and Authorship, Journalism and the Nineteenth-Century Press (Routledge, 2021).