An author and historical novelist, often publishing under the pseudonym 'Christopher Hare'. Many of her novels were set in Cornwall and the West Country.
The larger part of her books were biographical or historical accounts of key figures from the fifteenth and sixteenth century. According to Rosemary Mitchell, that many of these books were about women represented 'her serious commitment to the recovery of the historical experience of women' in the age of suffrage campaigns.(1) She wrote biographies of Margaret of Austria, Isabella of Castile, Isabella of Milan, Guilia Gonzaga, and of women of the Italian Renaissance. With a particular interest in Italy, she was among many significant women popularisers of Dante’s life and work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
She married the Revd William Ryton Andrews (1834–1922) in 1861 and had three children. The youngest, Marian Elizabeth Andrews (1881–1977), was a painter and sculptor who spent time in St. Ives. She and her sisters, who were both suffrage activists, were all signatories to the women’s suffrage petition presented to parliament by J.S. Mill in June 1866. She lived out her later life in Eastbourne, Sussex.
A complete set of her works is part of the Elizabeth Treffry Collection. Held in the collections of the Hypatia Trust is a scrapbook of her contemporary reviews and photographs of the author. The books are currently stored in Mrs Mendelssohn’s writing desk which forms part of the Andrews-Westlake Gift.
(1). Rosemary Mitchell, 'Andrews, Marian [neé Hare; pseud. Christopher Hare] (1839–1929),' Oxford Dictionary of National Biography