The rosary
The Rosary is a warm and touching love story set in England circa 1909. Jane and Garth are in love, but as so often happens they are separated with obstacles to overcome. Florence Barclay tells their story with compassion and a deep understanding of her character’s innermost feelings and desires.
Profile
The novelist Florence Louisa Charlesworth was born on 2 December 1862. Her father was the Reverend Samuel Charlesworth who was the Rector of Limpsfield, Surrey. The family, consisting of her mother and father, her elder sister Annie, Florence and her younger sister Maud, moved to London in 1869. Florence is known to have been kept busy visiting the poor and singing at religious gatherings, something that stood her in good stead in her married life. In March 1881, at the age of eighteen, she married the Reverend Charles W. Barclay. During their honeymoon touring the Holy Land it is claimed that they discovered the true mouth of Jacob's Well, where Christ is thought to have rested. She became an accomplished public speaker and was to tour America giving lectures on her find in Palestine. The couple settled to parish and family life and she bore eight children.
Following ill health she turned to writing and her first work, from 1905, was a short novel called The wheels Of time. She sent this and her subsequent novel The rosary to her sister Maud who was living in America. It was Maud who arranged for their publication. The rosary (1909) found instant success, selling 150,000 copies in a year. It is a love story, extolling the benefits of wedded bliss, a theme she was to continue to use with similar popular success. She felt that her destiny was to write works that inspired people to live good honest lives without being introduced to sin and evil through the printed page.
Florence was an admirer of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, visiting the haunts of the poet including Wimpole Street in London and the Browning's