Riddell, Charlotte Eliza Lawson (1832–1906), novelist, was born 30 September 1832 at the Barn, Carrickfergus, the youngest daughter of James Cowan , high sheriff of Co. Antrim, and his English wife, Ellen, née Kilshaw. Her father died before she reached majority and she left for London with her mother in the harsh winter of 1855. She married J. H. Riddell, a civil engineer, of Winson Green House, Staffordshire, in 1857.
Her first novels were published under the pseudonym F. G. Trafford, a title she abandoned in 1864 for the name by which she is commonly known, Mrs J. H. Riddell. Her mother died in 1856, before Riddell became properly successful with the publication of George Geith of Fen Court (1864). Her contract for this book offered £800, but her riches were dissipated by the debts her husband left on his death in 1880. Her novels are typically constructed for Victorian serial publication. George Geith of Fen Court, for example, is divided into fifty-nine short chapters with a brief introduction and conclusion. Her subjects were more radical, and her interest in the mechanics of business, and the sexual affairs of a Church of England curate in hiding, was quite daring for her day. Her favourite novelistic location was London and its surrounding areas, but Ireland does figure intermittently in her writing. The Gothic Diarmid Chittock's story (1894) tells of an English gentleman bored with London who retires to his friend's west of Ireland mansion. There he discovers that his friend has committed murder. The pessimism of eternal damnation, so favoured by Bram Stoker (qv), is renounced by the author's Victorian optimism. Evil is rooted out, the house is exorcised and a new, thriving family is transplanted into the old house. The colonial moral is not difficult to detect.
She spent her adult life between a variety of addresses in the counties of Middlesex and Surrey. She travelled to the Black Forest in Germany in 1884 after the publication of her semi-autobiographical A struggle for fame (1883), and ventured to Derry and Donegal in 1885. Her experience of periodical publication led her to become editor and co-proprietor of the St James's Magazine in April 1868. With its advertisements for foreign stocks, shares and bank notes, St James's Magazine is identifiably part of the world of speculative capital that she describes with such interest in her novels. She lived in relative seclusion from 1886 and was the first author to receive a pension from the Society of Authors in May 1901. She died 24 September 1906 at Hounslow, Middlesex, and was buried at Heston churchyard, to a reading of Tennyson's ‘Crossing the bar’.