Corbett was born on 16 August 1846 near Wigan atStandishgate. Her parents were Mary (born Marsden) and Benjamin Corbett[citation needed]. Her father worked at a forge and she had a good education.[3]
Corbett worked as a journalist for theNewcastle Daily Chronicle and as a popular writer of adventure and society novels.[4] Many of her novels originated as magazine serials and not published in book form.[5]
In June 1889,Mrs Humphry Ward's open letter "An Appeal Against Female Suffrage" was published inThe Nineteenth Century with over a hundred other female signatories against the extension of Parliamentary suffrage to women.[6] Inflamed by this "most despicable piece of treachery ever perpetrated towards women by women", Corbett wrote and publishedNew Amazonia.[4]
WhileNew Amazonia was the most explicitly feminist of her novels, it was not the only one to deal with the position of women in society.[7] Her novelWhen the Sea Gives Up Its Dead (1894) features one of the earliest female detectives in fiction, Annie Cory,[8] and is itself preceded byAdventures of a Lady Detective around 1890, possibly published in a periodical.[9] Her writing was not universally well received, butHearth and Home listed her along withArthur Conan Doyle as one of the masters of the art of the detective novel.[7]
She married, in 1868, in Sheffield, George Corbett who was a fitter of steam engines and later marine engines. They had four children, of whom three survived childhood.[3]
^Miller, Elizabeth Carolyn (March 2005). "Trouble with she-dicks: private eyes and public women in the Adventures of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective".Victorian Literature and Culture.33 (1):47–65.doi:10.1017/S1060150305000720.S2CID163089934.
