Mary Eyles Gubbins

"She cried, very softly, and thought no one saw her." Illustration for the story "Blind" by Mary Eyles Gubbins, which begins with Katherine refusing to marry Michael and ends with her accepting him; in the scene illustrated here, Katherine listens to her brother Harry (who is nine and dying of a lingering illness) tell her and their mother that he has seen Michael and that Michael has gone blind. (Once a Week, volume 8, page 658) Mary Eyles Gubbins (1818–1887, Egerton) was a British writer of novels and short stories.

Personal life Mary Eyles Egerton was born in Backford, Cheshire in 1818. She married John Panton Gubbins, a judge in the Indian civil service, in 1839: John's brother Martin Gubbins played a part in the Siege of Lucknow. She was related by marriage to the novelist Frances Wilbraham.

Upon John Gubbins' retirement, he received a silver box with a coffered lid, engraved on the bottom, from "about 2000 Natives on his leaving Delhi in 1852." In 2013 this was sold for £15,000 at Christie's along with a reproduction of a painting of Mary Eyles and daughter Leila. After his retirement, they lived in Milverton, Warwickshire, where she wrote her novels.

The Pall Mall Gazette reviewed The Ladye Shakerley in April 1871, giving it the title Ye Ladye Shakerley. The reviewer begins by calling it "This charming novelette" but does not favour the lengthy "chronicle of Cheshire worthies" and concludes that:

The Athenaeum reviewer also enjoyed the book but found the historical section over-long:

The Ladye Shakerley had gone into a second edition by July 1871. In the 1873-1874 volume of Charing Cross magazine there appeared "A Missing Chapter of The Ladye Shakerley: by One of the House of Egerton", although the list of contributors to the volume listed "Mrs Gubbins".

In The Exiles at St. Germains a woman tells her grandchildren stories of her own great-grandmother's days as nurse to the daughter of Mary of Modena, exiled queen of Scotland, living with her husband James II of England at the Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye near Paris from 1688 onwards. A reviewer in The Academy was unimpressed by The Exiles at St. Germains and concluded that:

The publisher's advertisements for The Exiles at St. Germains quoted reviews from The Morning Post which described it as "picturesque, graphic and entertaining as well as moral and pathetic", and The Standard which found it to be:

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