Louisa M. Spooner

Louisa Matilda Spooner's grave at St Cynhaearn's Church, Ynyscynhaearn. She is buried in the same grave as her parents. Louisa Matilda Spooner, pseudonym L. M. S. (1820 – 5 December 1886), was a Welsh novelist.

Life She was born in Maentwrog and baptised on 24 March 1820, as the fifth of eventually ten children of her English parents James Spooner (1790–1856) and his first wife, Elizabeth (née Easton; 1787–1850). James was a surveyor and engineer and was hired by the Welsh entrepreneur William Madocks (1773–1826) to assist him with his grand land and town development plans.

Her older brother Charles Easton Spooner (1818–1889) was the first of her siblings to be born in Wales. By the time the sixth Spooner child, Amelia (1824–1922), arrived, lodgings in Maentwrog became inevitably cramped and the family moved to Plas Tan yr Allt, William Madocks’ spacious former home in Tremadog. In Country Landlords, she discussed landownership and republicanism in the nineteenth century, while The Welsh Heiress engages with the impact of alcoholism on farming communities. All of her novels are set vaguely in Merionethshire, the area where she spent the majority of her life.

Country Landlords prominently features a Black servant, Yarico. The name originates in historic accounts of an enslaved native woman from the West Indies and its subsequent use in abolitionist literature.

Towards the end of her life, she published a serialised short story, ‘Amos Dura: or “The Faithful Friend”’, in the conservative, religious magazine Golden Hours (1884).