The announcement of Matilda Barbara Betham-Edwards's death in the London Times was subtitled "An Interpreter of France"--a fair summation of her career as most readers remembered it and as she wanted it to be remembered. In her sixty-two years as an active writer Betham-Edwards produced novels, short stories, poems, articles on contemporary events, and volumes recording her travels in Europe (especially France) and North Africa. In 1913, toward the end of her long life, she was delighted by the selection of her first novel, The White House by the Sea (1857), as one of the volumes to be published in the New World's Classics series. Before her death she was granted the even greater honor of a civil list pension by the British government. She was a friend of such literary luminaries as George Eliot, George Henry Lewes, Coventry Patmore, and Sarah Grand; Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, the pioneer...