Isabella Frances Romer
Isabella Frances Romer was an English novelist, travel writer, and biographer.
Family
The eldest child of army officer Brigadier-General John William Augustus "Handsome Jack" Romer, and Mary Ann Romer, née Cuthbert, Isabella Frances Romer was born in London on 13 May 1798, and was baptised at Marylebone, Middlesex, now part of the City of Westminster. Apart from the House Of Commons' descriptions of her mother's situation in 1814, when Romer was just 15, little is known of her family and its circumstances before and after the death of her father.Marriage
Isabella Frances Romer married Major William Medows Hamerton of the 7th Fusiliers, in France, at the house of the British Ambassador, on 24 December 1818. They had one child; a daughter, Frances Augusta Caroline Hamerton, later, Mrs. Frederick William Charles Buxton Whalley.Separation and divorce
Romer separated from Hamerton on 27 March 1827, due to her adultery. Her co-respondent, John Thomas Bushe (1794—1870), was also married. Immediately upon her separation from Hamerton, she reverted to her maiden name, and went to Paris to live with Bushe, who had also left England for France in March 1827 to avoid being served legal papers by Hamerton's solicitor.Hamerton was eventually granted a divorce from Romer, by Parliament, in 1830; he remarried, marrying Sarah Ann Strangways at Cheltenham, Gloucestershire on 7 July 1830. Romer never married again.
Author
"Mrs. Hamerton"
In 1827, Mrs. Leslie and her Grandchildren, written by "Mrs. Hamerton" was published by Charles Tilt.Jerrold's claim, made 80 years after the event, that the "Mrs. Hamerton, care of Mrs. Reynolds", to whom Thomas Hood, had sent a letter and £15, was either "Charlotte Cox Reynolds", the mother of John Hamilton Reynolds, or "Eliza Reynolds", Hood's sister-in-law, and Reynolds' wife who had assumed the pen-name of "Mrs. Hamerton" and had written the work in question was entirely mistaken; it was, indeed, the real "Mrs. Hamerton".
Although no mention of the non-Romer work, Mrs. Leslie and her Grandchildren, is made in any of the posthumous accounts of Romer's life and works, with Romer having separated from her husband on 27 March 1827, Isabella Frances Romer who would have submitted the final draft of her manuscript to the publisher before her separation, and was now overseas in France was temporarily using her friend's London address for her commercial correspondence.
Travel
"Mrs. Romer", as she was known, gained a reputation mainly as a travel writer, based on the volumes The Rhone, the Darro, and the Guadalquivir. A Summer Ramble in 1842, A Pilgrimage to the Temples and Tombs of Egypt, Nubia and Palestine in 1845–6, and The Bird of Passage, or, Flying Glimpses of Many Lands, the last consisting of "a series of short stories set in Eastern Europe & the Middle East".Although encouraging the physical travel of English women to the middle East, desiring "to warn others from those contingencies against which none had warned me", she stressed that travel in these domains could be extremely demanding for excessively "delicate" females:
Fiction
"Mrs. Romer's" first book was a fictionalised account of mesmerism, a controversial technique at the time: Sturmer: a Tale of Mesmerism.In 1840 she began to contribute sketches and short stories to Bentley's Miscellany and other periodicals, including The Albion, and Henry Colburn's New Monthly Magazine, the great rival to Bentley's.
Her biography of Marie Thérèse Charlotte, Duchess of Angoulême, was completed after her death by John Doran and published as Filia Dolorosa.