William Black (novelist)
| William Black | |
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| Born |
13 November 1841 Glasgow, Lanarkshire |
| Died | 10 December 1898 (aged 57) Brighton, Sussex |
| Nationality | Scottish |
| Occupation | novelist |
| Notable work |
A Daughter of Heth (1871) A Princess of Thule (1873) |
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William Black (13 November 1841 – 10 December 1898) was a novelist born in Glasgow, Scotland. During his own lifetime Black's novels were immensely popular, and were compared favourably with those of Anthony Trollope. However, his fame and popularity did not survive long into the twentieth century.
William was born to James Black and his second wife Caroline Conning. He was educated to be a landscape painter, a training that influenced his literary life, and as a writer he became celebrated for the detailed and atmospheric descriptions of landscapes and seascapes in novels such as White Wings: A Yachting Romance (1880).
At the age of twenty-three he went to London, after some experience with Glasgow journalism, and joined the staff of The Morning Star, and, later, the Daily News, of which journal he became assistant-editor. He wrote a weekly serial in The Graphic. During the Austro-Prussian War he acted as a war correspondent.
His first novel, James Merle, appeared in 1864, and had little success. Black later disowned the novel and reputedly bought copies to destroy them. Two further early novels Love or Marriage (1868) and The Monarch of Mincing Lane (1871) did little to advance his career, and all three were omitted from the collected edition of Black's works issued by the publishing firm Sampson Low from 1892.
It was the publication of A Daughter of Heth in 1871 that at once established his popularity. It is the story of a young girl brought up in Catholic France, who comes to live with her more austere Protestant relatives in southern Scotland, and ends with personal tragedy. The travel story The Strange Adventures of a Phaeton followed in 1872, and in 1874 A Princess of Thule was another big success and was later adapted into a musical play, The Maid of Arran, by a young L. Frank Baum.
Retiring from journalism the next year he devoted himself entirely to fiction. Several collections of short stories and a further 22 novels followed; the last – Wild Eelin – in 1898, just before his death on 10 December of that year.
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