While Elizabeth Anne Treglown was living at Camborne, Cornwall, with her parents, Josiah Henry Harris (c. 1848 – 18 April 1917), a newspaper reporter, visited her and courted her.
[11] By now, her family had moved to Montpelier in Bristol, where Elizabeth gave birth to her daughter at 7 York Road, on 4 February 1867,[13] initially registered as Martha Annie, but later known as Marie.
[16] They had one child themselves, Valentine Alexander Nenon Connor (5 June 1875 – 10 May 1927), who emigrated to Canada and worked an engineer there before dying of stomach cancer and pneumonia in Toronto.
She copied an entire novel by hand and sent it to a London publisher, who recognised it, and was so puzzled by the childish handwriting that he visited to find out who was responsible.
Connor's parents packed her off to a convent in France where she fell in love with the Mother Superior and the Priest and became a devout Catholic for the rest of her life.
[1]: 39 After returning from France, Connor got stage-struck, falling in love with the actor Wilson Barrett (1846–1904), and writing poems inspired by him.
"[22] Sutherland calls this book "An extraordinary mishmash of romantic and religious passion" and said that "it provoked most reviewers to sarcastic drollery", but that "women readers liked it.
Born in Scotland but growing up in Liverpool, Leighton moved to London in 1879 and began working for Young Folks magazine as an assistant editor.
[23] Kemp and Mitchell state that the Connor and Leighton eloped to Scotland,[4]: 238 but the UK marriage records show that they got married in Marylebone, London in the first quarter of 1889.
[26] The family lived at 'Vallombrosa' at 40 Abbey Road, St John's Wood, London, where they led a chaotic bohemian existence.
[27] Connor and her husband had four children: The following is a list, principally drawn from the Jisc Library Hub Discover collated catalogue.
Connor continued to churn out novels after her marriage, writing four in total with Leighton, including her most successful work Convict 99.
It has a highly sensational plot in which the hero, Laurence Gray, is framed by a rival in love on false charges of embezzlement and murder.
The force of the book lies in its graphic and credible depictions of life in jail (particularly the part played by corporal punishment, or the ‘cat’).
"[5]: 370 The story was published first as a serial in Answers one of the publications produced by Alfred Harmsworth (1865–1922),[note 31] for whom both Connor and Leighton worked.
Quoting Grant Richards, the head of that publishing house, Kemp and Mitchell say that Convict 99 was hugely successful as a serial and was used time and again in different papers, but that it never attract as large a public in book form.
Harmsworth put his editors in their place when she was pregnant, and they were worried about a delayed installment, telling them that Connor would go on just the same even if she were about to give birth to triplets the next day.