Bessie Marchant

Elizabeth Marchant was born in Petham in Kent in 1862 and attended the local primary school. She preferred to be known as Bessie and moved to London in her early 20s when she taught at a Baptist School. She married Jabez Ambrose Comfort, a clergyman in 1889 and became Mrs J A Comfort. the couple lived in Charlebury in Oxfordshire and had one daughter.She is reputed to have written over 150 adventure novels, many of which were set in exotic places (vide Among the Torches of the Andes (1898)) although she never left England.She began her literary career in the 1880s and, perhaps not surprisingly, wrote in the style of the Victorian adventure novel. She was so good at the genre that she was at one time called 'the female Henty'. However, she differed from Henty in that in many of her novels the lead characters in her books were very often female, although she did write books with male heroes.Her first published book was Broken Barriers (1889) and she produced around three or four volumes per year, mostly marketed as 'books for girls', and she continued to write until the end with her last book The Triumphs of Three being published posthumously in 1942. Her output ran to around 143 novels.Gerry WolstenholmeSeptember 2010