Lucas Malet

Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison. Pseudonym, Lucas Malet.

Lucas Malet was the pseudonym of Mary St Leger Kingsley (4 June 1852 — 27 October 1931), a Victorian novelist. Of her novels, The Wages of Sin (1891) and The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901) were especially popular.[1] Malet scholar Talia Schaffer notes that she was "widely regarded as one of the premier writers of fiction in the English-speaking world"[2] at the height of her career, but her reputation declined by the end of her life and today she is rarely read or studied. At the height of her popularity she was "compared favorably to Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, with sales rivaling Rudyard Kipling."[2] Malet's fin de siecle novels offer "detailed, sensitive investigations of the psychology of masochism, perverse desires, unconventional gender roles, and the body."[2]

  1. ^ I. Ousby ed., The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (1995) p. 594
  2. ^ a b c Schaffer, Talia (21 May 2010). "Lucas Malet Biography". English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920. 47 (3): 347–349. ISSN 1559-2715.