Lucy Bethia Walford

Lucy Bethia (Colquhoun) Walford (17 April 1845 – 11 May 1915) was a Scottish novelist and artist, who wrote 45 books, the majority of them "light-hearted domestic comedies".

Walford was born Lucy Bethia Colquhoun on 17 April 1845 at Portobello, a seaside resort then outside Edinburgh,[2] the seventh child of Frances Sarah Fuller Maitland (1813–1877), a poet and hymn writer and John Colquhoun (1805–1885) of Luss, Dunbartonshire, author of The Moor and the Loch.

Her reading included works by Charlotte Mary Yonge and Susan Ferrier, and in later years Jane Austen.

[4] On 23 June 1869 she married Alfred Saunders Walford (died 1907), a magistrate of Ilford, Essex, and they moved to London.

By the age of 65 Walford had written 45 full-length novels, including Pauline (1877), The Baby's Grandmother (1884), Stiff Necked Generation (1889), and The Havoc of a Smile (1890).