Lucas Malet
Lucas Malet was the pseudonym of Mary St. Leger Kingsley, an English novelist born on June 4, 1852, in Hampshire. The daughter of historian and clergyman Charles Kingsley, she had a restrictive upbringing that fostered her love for literature. After a difficult marriage, she began her writing career, producing novels that often explored complex women in challenging relationships. Her work was marked by stark realism and psychological depth, drawing inspiration from French authors like Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola.
Malet gained significant attention with her novel *The Wages of Sin* (1891), which tackled themes of illicit sex and murder, stirring public controversy. Other notable works, such as *The Carissima* and *The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance*, further established her reputation for addressing taboo subjects and the darker aspects of human relationships. Despite her initial success, Malet's popularity waned after World War I, leading to financial difficulties and a decline in literary recognition. She converted to Roman Catholicism in 1902, a significant personal transformation given her father's earlier opposition to the faith. Lucas Malet passed away on October 27, 1931, largely forgotten, though her contributions to literature, particularly regarding the exploration of psychological and social themes, have received renewed scholarly interest in recent years.
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Lucas Malet
Author
- Born: June 4, 1852
- Birthplace: Eversley, Hampshire, England
- Died: October 27, 1931
- Place of death: Tenby, South Wales
Biography
Mary St. Leger Kingsley was born June 4, 1852, in Eversley, Hampshire, England. Her father, Charles Kingsley, was a respected historian, a conservative Anglican clergyman, and a writer of historic novels. He maintained a strict household. Mary, who was never close to her older siblings, was educated entirely at the rectory and consequently had few friends. For companionship, she turned to reading. Although forbidden novels, she absorbed her father’s considerable library of history, philosophy, and theology.
After her father’s death in 1875, Mary married the man her father had selected for her: his curate, who was thirteen years Mary’s senior. They commenced what was a difficult and often lonely marriage. The couple would have no children.
Shortly after her marriage, Mary turned to novel writing. Careful to avoid association with her famous father, she coined the pseudonym Lucas Malet. Her novels were stark realistic narratives, psychological studies in the manner of the French authors Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola (both writers Malet admired). Unsurprisingly, her plots centered on complex women trapped within relationships who learned after emotional trials to accept a life of service and loveless dedication to others.
Malet’s novels shocked the public. It was The Wages of Sin (1891) that secured Malet’s place at the forefront of fin-de-siècle novelists. A scandalous account of illicit sex and murder among London’s bohemian artists, the novel caused an uproar. The Carissima, similarly, was controversial. In it, a cruel wife drives her sensitive husband mad and compels him ultimately to commit suicide. With the story, Malet critiqued with morbid intensity the emotional oppression of middle-class marriage.
The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance marked the high point of Malet’s reputation as a controversial novelist of the aberrant and the violent. It was calculated to shock. The book is a bizarre account of gender reversals in which a genetically deformed man (with his feet sprouting from his knees) is sexually enslaved by an aggressive, dominant cousin. Malet’s books, despite significant outcry against their extreme subject matter and concern over such decadent subjects in the hands of a woman novelist, sold phenomenally, and her reputation appeared secured.
After her husband’s death, Malet began a lifelong relationship with a second cousin, Lilian Mary Vallings. She catapulted again into national attention when, in 1902, she converted to Roman Catholicism, long the object of her father’s withering attacks. Over the next decade, Malet continued to write but found her audience dwindling. The critical response to her work cited her florid style, her stilted sense of dialogue, and her fascination with deviant behavior as clichés of an earlier era. By the end of World War I, Malet was in financial distress, unable to reclaim her literary reputation among the new school of experimental modernist novelists. By the mid-1920’s, Malet was diagnosed with cancer. At her death, on October 27, 1931, she was penniless and largely forgotten.
Malet continues to be marginalized, despite a voluminous 2002 critical biography. At the turn of the last century, however, she had earned a reputation for probing the psychology of aberrant behavior by creating narratives rich with Freudian nuance that featured characters trapped by unconventional desires.