The 1881 census records the author Sarah Doudney living in Widley.
Sarah Doudney (b.15 Jan. 1841, Portsea; d. 08 Dec.1926, Oxford) was an energetic and driven author of more than 75 works of fiction, poetry, and song. Much of her work was published in periodicals and magazines, including The Girls Own Paper, Charles Dickens’s All The Year Round, and the Evangelical periodicals, Good Words and The Quiver. Many of her 35 novels are directed at girls, but she also wrote adult fiction. Moral dilemmas, chaste romances, and religious themes dominate her writing, and she also specialised in Christmas stories. Her life and career are under-analysed in scholarship and wider culture but would offer insights into the complex intersections of Evangelicalism and literature in late-Victorian Britain; as well as being of potential interest to scholars of children’s literature.
A precocious talent, the 15 year old Doudney published ‘The Lesson of the Water Mill’ (1864) in the Anglican Churchman’s Family Magazine, a magazine to which Winchester author Charlotte M. Yonge was also a youthful contributor. ‘The Lesson of the Water Mill’ became a popular religious song in the UK and US. Some of her hymns, including ‘Saviour, Now the Day is Ending’ and ‘Sleep on Beloved’, are still occasionally sung. A volume of Doudney’s poems, Psalms for Life appeared in 1870.
Her first novel was Under Grey Walls (1871), but Archie’s Old Desk (1872) launched her career, and was well-known enough in the following decades to receive a mention in Clayhanger (1910) by Arnold Bennett. Doudney’s other novels include Nelly Channell (1883), Thy Heart’s Desire (1888), and A Vanished Hand (1896). Portsmouth and Hampshire appear throughout her work, but of all her novels, The Great Salterns (1875) is perhaps the most focused on the city.
Doudney was the daughter of George Ebenezer Doudney, co-owner of a soap and candle business with factories in Mile End, Portsmouth and Plymouth and Lucy Doudney. Her uncle, David Alfred Doudney, was an evangelical clergyman and editor of The Gospel Magazine who lived at 386, Mile End Terrace. The family’s evangelicalism and Calvinism were the abiding influence on Doudney’s career. In Sarah’s early childhood, the Doudney family moved to the Hampshire village of Catherington, and during this time she attended a Southsea school for French girls, Madame Dowell’s College. Doudney remained in Catherington until around the age of thirty, but is listed in the 1871 census as living once more in Portsea. By 1881 she was in Widley, Hampshire, and in 1891 in Derby Road, Portsea. After the death of her mother in 1891 and her father two years later, Doudney relocated to Oxford, and continued her writing career for more than a decade before retiring. She died in 1926.
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