Matilda Charlotte Houstoun (née Jesse; 16 August 1811 – June 1892) was a British travel writer, novelist, biographer, and women's right activist.

[1][2][3][4] She is best known for her series of travel writings, particularly Texas and the Gulf of Mexico (1844) and Hesperos, and their observations about African-American life during the times of the Confederate Deep South.

[5][6][7] Later on, she turned her pen from novels to social reform, particularly on the rights of working class women and single mothers.

[18] The debate around the abolition of slavery across the British Empire was a burning political question in the early nineteenth century.

[18] Her second marriage was on 1 October 1839 in the chapel of the British Embassy in Paris, to Captain William Houstoun of the 10th Royal Hussars cavalry regiment.

Departing September 1842 from England, she went with her husband, Captain William Houstoun, travelling on their 200-tonne yacht the Dolphin, fitted with six cannon, over to the United States of America where they landed in Galveston on 18 December, later arriving at New Orleans between December 1842 and January 1843, then sailing along onto the Gulf of Mexico, alternating between Texas and New Orleans during their stay.

[25][26][27][28] Upon one of these intervals, returning from New Orleans to Galveston, she took a trip on the 111-tonne steamboat Dayton to Houston Texas upon which she spent three days, travelling along the Buffalo Bayou.

The two did not agree, Roemor characterising her as a 'snob', Houstoun describing him as unfamiliar to a 'change in raiment' and 'having no teeth' due to a 'tobacco' smoking, which she thought of as a disgusting habit to practise.

[30] The second trip appeared to have been taken by Captain Houstoun to invest in Texan sugar plantations, however she only observed as a tourist to Texas life.

[5] In Yachting to the New World, Houstoun notes upon politics and other topics like the advent of a civil war in the United States.

Expansion of this was seen as a moral Christian duty to "brothers" in need and certainly appears to have been the mindset upon which Houstoun went to the United States with her aunt Mrs. Townsend:[33][34] Particularly surrounding the culture of the black population in New Orleans, she at first believed them to be something akin to passive agents, but over her 1844 work comes to form a more intersectional view of the New Orleanians in the period, regarding them as active agents in their own affairs: In Hesperos, Houstoun's 1850 publication, she touches on a number of topics including Christianity amongst African-Americans, the settlements of Liberia (which she describes as "the wilderness"), the population figures in the Americas comparing "whites" and "blacks", the effects of slavery on wealth distribution on the upper classes amongst the northern states, black labour in the West Indies, redistribution of global slave routes, education among the southern African-American population, and England's role in the cotton trade, abolition, and "prevention of the slave trade".

[38] Her own intersectionality displays how she thought of the "blacks" as a group to be "pitied" and, particularly Africans who without "the light of civilization" and the "[Americans'] exertion throughout the means of missionaries to propagate the gospel and civilise the nations on the African coast ... [and] a perpetual stream of industrious and intelligent men [who] will be pouring in from the United States" would "retrograde":[39] Her second husband leased land in North western Ireland however he died on 23 Oct 1872 in Dhulough Lodge Ireland.

Her novel Recommended to Mercy (1862), was a precursor to a number of her other fiction works, a large number of which includes stories surrounding female leads or heroines who are often involved in dangerous scenarios and settings which explore the fallen woman protagonist where each is proactive in Houstoun's novels.

[44] These have been described as 'sentimental' works of fiction, which in the 19th century were known for being dissuaded to be read by male authors, known as ‘silly novels by woman novelists’.

The eldest, Susan Brigham, moves to be with her wealthy godmother Christina Llewellen and her niece, Margaret Mayford, in the countryside.

[50] Mercy includes common sentimental novel tropes (like bigamy trials or marriage infidelity) but due to Houstoun's writing of Helen's actions as an ‘experienced heroine’ (the fallen woman trope subverted and re-examined), Mercy has been reclassified by modern scholars as a ‘novel of experience’.

Helen subverts the audience's expectations by choosing to be a mistress rather than be married unhappily to a stranger, condemning such marriages as ‘errors [for which] she saw no excuse’.

[54] Helen therefore ‘disregards the social and legal absolutes’ of Victorian societal expectation to instead ‘privately carry out [her] ideals’ she holds for her own happiness.

The female protagonist, Zoe "Cherie" Gordon is the daughter of a Louisiana plantation owner, with numerous Prince Charming-type love interests.

[63] The story revolves around the marriage of two women who are both named Ruby, whom a reviewer describes as 'above the average of young lady heroines'.

On her cousin's advice Madeline flees to London, where she then 'furnishes conclusive evidence of an alibi' to attempt to separate from her husband, to regain standing once more in Meadshire.

[58] Madeline, now a mother, becomes a fallen woman with Houstoun ending the last volume on the cliffhanger that 'though "gone like a shadow" from the busy world, [she] shall return'.

[70] She gave birth to this child as an impoverished single mother out of wedlock, between January and March in 1875 at the Parkhurst workhouse and named her daughter Agnes Ellen Stallard.

[72] Upon collecting the child, it was noted that Agnes, now 2 years of age, was unable to stand or walk and often bled from her nose and ears.

The charge was eventually altered to 'penal servitude for life', the outcome being that Stallard served twelve years in prison.

[70] Houstoun later noted she "looked back with thankfulness" for her 1889 work, as it was ‘successful in obtaining [Stallard's] release after twelve years [as a] convict.

[77] Suffering from ‘severe neuralgic affection of the joints... [and]... injury to both knees’ she was plagued by continuing health problems from many years as a gardener, leading to Houstoun dying of a cerebral haemorrhage.