Just like today's best loved writers for young people, such as Rowling, Jacqueline Wilson and John Green, Meade was an expert at interacting with her readers.
She knew exactly how to market herself: in articles about her books for younger readers, for example, she often referred to her own children when talking about her books for teenage girls featuring “Wild Irish Girls”, she played up her Irishness and wrote about her experiences of growing up in a Church of Ireland rectory, the dreaming daughter of a rector with little belief in his imaginative daughter’s emerging talent. Meade was certainly well placed to advise would-be authors. Long before creative writing was a fixture on university courses, she controversially campaigned for the creation of “schools of fiction” to support and help to train professional writers who, like her, would “live by their pens”. She described herself as writing “to order”, producing whatever kinds of books publishers required, and advised aspiring writers to be “business-like”. Meade had little time for ideas about inspiration or tortured literary geniuses. So why has she dropped out of the public imagination despite such popularity during her lifetime? Could it be that her books, with such memorable titles as A Sweet Girl Graduate, Wild Kitty, Light O' the Morning or The Story of an Irish Girl and Dumps: A Plain Girl, are simply no good – too much of their time to compete with today's giants of children's literature? Meade also wrote crime fiction – her stories appeared in the Strand, alongside Sherlock Holmes – romance, ghost stories and invented a number of sub-genres including the medical mystery. LT Meade in June 1910, four years before her death: Photograph: Bassano / National Portrait Galery, LondonĪ small sample of LT Meade’s prolific output. But she also wrote widely in crime fiction – her stories appeared in the Strand, alongside Sherlock Holmes – romance, ghost stories and many other genres besides, and she invented a number of sub-genres including the medical mystery.
Her 1886 novel A World of Girls, which sold an impressive 37,000 copies, had a huge influence on girls' school stories of the twentieth century by the likes of Enid Blyton. After moving to London in her early thirties, she published about280 books, dominating the market for girls' books in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. She's probably the most prolific author Ireland has ever produced.
Like the creator of Harry Potter, Meade was a bestselling phenomenon who wrote across audiences and inspired devotion among her readers. But this is exactly what happened to the Cork-born writer LT Meade, who died 100 years ago today and who was the JK Rowling of her day. Rowling: so ubiquitous, influential and popular – the thought seems absurd. Imagine if JK Rowling’s name rang no bells in people’s minds 100 years from now.
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