Bertha Thomas

Bertha Thomas (19 March 1845 – 24 August 1918), was a Victorian pro-feminist writer, author of the 1880 novel The Violin Player.

Life Thomas was born on 19 March 1845 at Shelsley Beauchamp in Worcestershire. Her father was Canon John Thomas (died 1883), and her sisters were the composer Florence Ashton Marshall and the professional clarinettist Frances Thomas. There were also short stories, other writings and articles that were published in periodicals in the UK and the US. A collection of her short stories was re-issued in 2008. Like her sister Frances, Bertha remained unmarried.

Work The 1880 novel The Violin-Player has been described as "perhaps the most triumphant narrative of female musicality in Victorian literature". Her 1875 booklet Latest Intelligence from the Planet Venus, first published in Fraser’s Magazine, presented a satirical argument against giving women the vote. In The Son of the House (1900), a mother imprisons her son under the guise of insanity to protect the family inheritance - a subversion of The Madwoman in the Attic Victorian trope of an insane woman controlled by her male relatives.

Thomas also wrote the libretto for her sister Florence's operetta Prince Sprite in 1891, published by Novello.