Cynthia Stockley

Stockley was born in Bloemfontein, Orange Free State.[1][2] Her mother, Mary Ann Webb (Corbett), emigrated from County Clare in Ireland at the age of 18, in 1859,[3] whilst her father, Abel Arthur Webb, arrived from Northamptonshire, England, in 1861, at the age of 23.[4]

Her mother died when Cynthia was two. Her father subsequently remarried, and Cynthia then lived with four siblings (one died in infancy), her step-mother, a half-sister, and two half-brothers. After attending St. Michael's School, Bloemfontein, she moved to live with her sister in Mashonaland.

In 1895 she married[5] Philip Stockley (1870-1917), a member of the Mashonaland Mounted Police, in Salisbury (now Harare). They moved to Umtali (now Mutare) where her daughter Dorothy was born in 1896.

The Stockleys separated later in 1896: she to take up a career in journalism and writing, he to participate in the Boer War. Thinking Philip had been killed in the Boer War, she remarried. Her husband was Joseph Byrne (1870-1945), an Irish doctor in New York; their son Patrick was born there in 1905 pp99.[4]

She also worked as an actress and bought a farm in Rhodesia and a house in Norfolk. In 1916 married Harold Pelham Browne (1880 -1939), an officer in the British army serving in Paris pp288.[4]

Stockley died in London in January 1936, having gassed herself in her apartment. Her death was reported in newspapers around the world. The coroner returned a verdict of death by gas poisoning ‘whilst of unsound mind’.[6] She is buried in Sheringham, Norfolk.

Stockley wrote her first novel in her adopted country, with Virginia of the Rhodesians (1903) . In The Claw (1911), Stockley's heroes are heavily impacted by the powerful African landscape: "Africa has kissed him on the mouth and he will not leave her."[7] In The Claw, she wrote of the country's empty landscapes that allowed for both personal freedom and expansion of the soul: "The world seemed filled with gracious dimness and made up of illimitable space. An indescribable feeling of happy freedom filled my heart. It seemed to me that the lungs of my soul drew breath and expanded as they had never done in any land before."[7] Although Stockley shows a commitment to Rhodesian patriotism in her novels, her nationalism shifted towards Union with South Africa in Tagati (1930).[7]

• McLoughlin, Tim and Betty (2015). Veld Girl: Cynthia Stockley - A life recreated. Sweden: Elementa. ISBN 978-9176370124. Archived from the original on 18 March 2017. Retrieved 17 March 2017.

• Works by Cynthia Stockley at Project Gutenberg
• Cynthia Stockley at IMDb