Introduction
Lucas Malet was the pseudonym of Mary St Leger Kingsley (4 June 1852 — 1931), a Victorian novelist. Of her novels, The Wages of Sin (1891) and The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901) were especially popular.
Life
She was born in Eversley, Hampshire, the daughter of Charles Kingsley (author of The Water Babies). In 1876, she married William Harrison, Minor Canon of Westminster, and Priest-in-Ordinary to the Queen; but the marriage was unhappy, and Malet lived for most of her life on the Continent with the singer Gabrielle Vallings.
Literary development
Malet's The Gateless Barrier (1900) is a novel-length ghost story - 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.
E. F. Benson acknowledged his debt to her critical advice in his memoir Our Family Affairs.
Works
- Mrs Lorimer: A Study in Black and White (1882)
- Colonel Enderby's Wife (1885)
- Little Peter: A Christmas Morality for Children of Any Age (1888)
- A Counsel of Perfection (1888)
- The Wages of Sin (1890)
- The Carissima: A Modern Grotesque (1896)
- The Gateless Barrier (1900)
- The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901), based on the life of Arthur MacMorrough Kavanagh
- The Far Horizon (1907)
- Adrian Savage (1911)
- Deadham Hard (1919)
- The Tall Villa (1920)
- The Survivors (1923)
- The Pool (1930)
She also completed her father's unfinished novel The Tutor's Story.