<!-- This should not be merged with the Mary Kingsley page.

That Mary Kingsley and Mary St Leger Kingsley are two different people! They are cousins-->

thumb|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. Malet scholar Talia Schaffer notes that she was "widely regarded as one of the premier writers of fiction in the English-speaking world" 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." Her paternal uncles Henry Kingsley and George Kingsley were both writers and her cousin Mary Kingsley was an African traveller and ethnologist. Kingsley was educated at home and studied art with Sir Edward Poynter, 1st Baronet. She was for a time a student at the Slade School. a colleague of her father's, Minor Canon of Westminster, and Priest-in-Ordinary to the Queen. Malet gave up artistic aspirations after the marriage. Critical attention and praise came with Malet's second novel, Colonel Enderby's Wife, published in 1885, which fictionalized her brief failed marriage. Five years after her husband's death, Kingsley became a convert to Catholicism. Vallings, much younger than Malet, was the author's cousin, romantic companion and adopted daughter. The two traveled abroad frequently together, including spending significant time in France. Malet spent much of the end of her life in France where she was a part of "high literary circles." The late nineteenth century English author George Gissing thought it 'a wooden book, without a living character or touching scene. The dialogue preposterous. So much for popular success'. On the other hand, he described her 1888 novel A Counsel of Perfection as 'not bad'. Henry James was both an admirer of Malet's writing and eventually a close personal friend. – an example of how, where her early novels were genteel Victorian romances, by the 1890s Malet was using the ideas of the aesthetic movement to explore more transgressive themes, such as adultery and sadism.

Her later novels, such as The Survivors (1923) are proto-modernist in their explorations of marginal consciousnesses. Despite her importance, Malet died in poverty in 1931. Her last novel, The Private Life of Mr. Justice Syme, was completed after the author's death by her companion Gabrielle Vallings, and published in August 1932. Lundberg's book, An Inward Necessity: the Writer's Life of Lucas Malet, remains the only major biography of the author. Talia Schaffer notes that Lundberg's book re-constructs historical gaps in the author's life created both by critical neglect and Malet's own actions (she asked Vallings to burn her personal papers, for example.)

  • "A Conversion" (Published in World Fiction 1922. It was later republished as "The Pool" in London Magazine 1930)
  • "The Lay Figure" (Published in The Graphic 1923)

Example of one of her books

In 1887, Kegan Paul & Co. published Kingsley's short book Little Peter: A Christmas Morality for Children of any Age with nine full page illustrations including the frontispiece, and several smaller ones, by Paul Hardy. The book tells the story of a small boy who befriends a very ugly and socially-despised man, who saves him in the end. The story was apparently popular as it was reprinted numerous times, most recently in 2010. In 1909, Henry Frowde and Hodder & Stoughton's joint venture reissued the book, but this time with eight full-page colour illustrations, including the frontispiece, by the renowned book illustrator Charles Edmund Brock. The costs of colour illustration had decreased significantly since the 1887 edition, and colour was now the norm for books for younger children. The following illustrations show the story in outline.

<gallery mode="packed-hover" heights="150">

File:Illustration for "Little Peter- A Christmas Morality for Children of Any Age" MET DP800816.jpg|First

File:Illustration for "Little Peter- A Christmas Morality for Children of Any Age" MET DP800817.jpg|Second

File:Illustration for "Little Peter- A Christmas Morality for Children of Any Age" MET DP800818.jpg|Third

File:Illustration for "Little Peter- A Christmas Morality for Children of Any Age" MET DP800819.jpg|Fourth

File:Illustration for "Little Peter- A Christmas Morality for Children of Any Age" MET DP800820.jpg|Fifth

File:Illustration for "Little Peter- A Christmas Morality for Children of Any Age" MET DP800821.jpg|Sixth

File:Illustration for "Little Peter- A Christmas Morality for Children of Any Age" MET DP800822.jpg|Seventh

File:Illustration for "Little Peter- A Christmas Morality for Children of Any Age" MET DP800823.jpg|Eight

</gallery>

See also

  • Alice Meynell
  • George Eliot
  • Madonna/whore complex
  • Ouida
  • Romain Rolland

References

References

  • Works at The Victorian Women Writers Project
  • Lucas Malet at The Literary Encyclopedia
  • Georgina Battiscombe, ‘Harrison, Mary St Leger (1852–1931)’, rev. Katharine Chubbuck, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004