Madame Maria E. Albanesi

Madame Maria E. Albanesi was born Effie Adelaide Marie Henderson in Adelaide, Australia, to Maria Nelson and Alexander Henderson in 1859. She had one younger sister, Carrie J. Henderson and several paternal half siblings. On December 19, 1882, Albanesi married the playwright Abraham Cecil Francis Fothergill Rowlands. The couple divorced in 1893. She then married Carlo Albanesi, a pianist, composer, and professor of music at the Royal Academy of Music, in 1896. The couple had two daughters, Eva Olympia Maria and Margherita “Meggie” Cecilia Brigida Lucia Maria Albanesi, a promising actress who died at the age of 24. 

Albanesi was a member of the Society of Women Journalists from 1901 to 1907. She was a successful romance novelist, publishing a total of 29 books in her lifetime. Her most popular works included Peter, A Parasite (1901), Susannah and One Other (1904), The Brown Eyes of Mary (1905), A Young Man from the Country (1906), Hearts and Sweethearts (1916), and Sally in her Alley (1925). In addition to novels, Albanesi published serial and short fiction under the names Maria Albanesi and Effie Adelaide Rowlands in periodicals such as The Daily Chronicle, M.A.P., The Academy, Athenaeum, and London Reader. She published a tribute to her daughter Meggie in Nash’s Magazine in 1928.

Albanesi died on October 16, 1936 at the age of 77.