Lucas Malet

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Standard Name: Malet, Lucas
Birth Name: Mary St Leger Kingsley
Married Name: Mary St Leger Harrison
Married Name: M. St L. Harrison
Pseudonym: Lucas Malet
Nickname: Polly
LM , author of eighteen novels in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was a great admirer of French fiction. Her books are hard to classify generically, having elements of the sensation novel (adultery, illicit sex, indirect murder, female protagonists who are heartlessly self-seeking), of satire, psychological analysis, and social protest. She breaks the taboos of genteel English fiction by lifting the lid of respectable life to reveal its members as engaged a in cut-throat struggle for status or survival. Her Times obituary stated that her place in literary history was secure.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
(29 October 1931): 14
Head-and-shoulders photograph of Lucas Malet, albumen print, c. 1894. She is seen in profile. with strong features and dark wavy hair in a bun on the nape of her neck. She has a dark choker round her neck and a deep frill edging her dress. The oval portrait has a leaf-pattern background with Malet's non-literary name in capitals: "Mary Kingsley Harrison".

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Family and Intimate relationships Charlotte Chanter
A daughter, Louisa Mary, was born to the Kingsley family in 1824, but died as an infant, before Charlotte was born. The writers Lucas Malet and Mary Kingsley were both Charlotte's nieces.
Chitty, Susan. The Beast and The Monk: A Life of Charles Kingsley. Hodder and Stoughton, 1974.
26-8
Sutherland, John. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford University Press, 1989.
114
Family and Intimate relationships Fanny Kingsley
Much to her father's delight, the younger daughter, Mary St Leger Kingsley (called Polly by her family), was courted by William Harrison , Kingsley's curate and close friend. She married Harrison in July 1876, the...
Family and Intimate relationships Mary Kingsley
A cousin of Mary, who was ten years older and shared the same first name (Mary St Leger Kingsley, a daughter of the Rev. Charles Kingsley and of Fanny Kingsley ) became an author, but...
Friends, Associates Marie Belloc Lowndes
MBL was an early member of Mary Cholmondeley 's Give and Take Club for women writers, and a founding member of another women's luncheon club, the Thirty . This included women from all walks of...
Friends, Associates Emma Marshall
Her daughter mentions among EM 's friends the gifted Frances Bunnett (who published her translations as F. E. Bunnett), Frances Alleyne (also a translator, as S. [Sarah] F. Alleyne), and Frances Mary Owen
Friends, Associates Annie S. Swan
She also mentions a great many literary names. Among women writers whom she calls the stars of her generation were Mary Augusta Ward , Lucas Malet , Lucy Clifford , Sarah Grand , Violet Hunt
Publishing Mary Angela Dickens
MAD 's interview A Talk with Lucas Malet appeared in The Windsor Magazine: For Men and Women.
Dickens, Mary Angela. “A Chat with Lucas Malet”. The Windsor Magazine: For Men and Women, No. 4, pp. 522 - 4.
522-4
Residence Fanny Kingsley
In June 1878, Queen Victoria offered FK rooms at Hampton Court Palace, which she declined. FK lived in a sixteenth-century manor house at Tachbrook Mallory in Warwickshire for the rest of her life. The...
Textual Features Mona Caird
In The Duel of the Sexes, MC expresses regret that some of those who had benefited from the women's movement had done nothing to support it and tended to cry down women: she cited...
Textual Production Laurence Alma-Tadema
As translator of Maeterlinck , LAT signed (with Yeats , Meredith , Swinburne , Hardy , Arthur Symons , Lucas Malet , John Oliver Hobbes, and others) a letter to the Times protesting against...

Timeline

23 January 1875
Charles Kingsley , clergyman and novelist, husband of Fanny Kingsley and father of Mary St Leger Kingsley (who later wrote as Lucas Malet ), died at Eversley, Hampshire.