The Missing Model

Lettice Galbraith is yet another of those mysterious women of British literature of whom little was recorded.Lizzie Susan Gibson was born on the 27th January 1859 in Kingston-Upon-Hull in Yorkshire into a comfortable middle-class family.Her education was primarily private but at fifteen her father died, and life became rather different.After several years in London, she moved with her mother to Reigate in Surrey. In 1885 she published her first story anonymously and her pseudonym ‘Lettice Galbraith’ only appeared from late 1892.Although her canon of works is small, she mainly achieved her reputation on a single volume of ghost and supernatural stories entitled ‘New Ghost Stories’.After her mother’s death in 1901 she moved to London and continued to write, this time moving on from the short story to the novel, as well as reverting to her given name.For the last two decades of her life, she did not continue her literary career.Lettice Galbraith died on 8th July 1932 at Downe, then in Kent. She was 73