John Oliver Hobbes

Pearl Mary Teresa Richards (November 3, 1867 – August 13, 1906) was an Anglo-American novelist and dramatist who wrote under the pen-name of John Oliver Hobbes. Though her work fell out of print in the twentieth century, her first book Some Emotions and a Moral was a sensation in its day, selling eighty thousand copies in only a few weeks.

Early years

Pearl Mary Teresa Richards, born in Boston, Massachusetts, was the eldest daughter of the businessman John Morgan Richards and his wife Laura Hortense Arnold. Her father had Calvinist roots and her grandfather was a Presbyterian minister. The family moved to London soon after her birth, and she was educated in London and Paris.

Beginnings

When she was nineteen, she married Reginald Walpole Craigie, by whom she had one son, John Churchill Craigie. The unhappy marriage was dissolved on her petition in July 1895. She was brought up as a Nonconformist, but in 1892 she was received into the Roman Catholic Church, where she remained, until her death, a devout and serious member. Her successful career as a novelist and playwright also made her a popular socialite with associates as diverse as George Tyrrell, Aubrey Beardsley, and George Moore, who had been her lover.

Career

Her first book, the brief, epigrammatic Some Emotions and a Moral, was published in 1891 in T. Fisher Unwin's Pseudonym Library. With its accounts of unhappy marriage and infidelity, it was an immediate hit. Following it were similarly bohemian novels like The Sinner's Comedy (1892), A Study in Temptations (1893), A Bundle of Life (1894), and The Gods, Some Mortals, and Lord Wickenham. The Herb Moon (1896), a country love story, was followed by The School for Saints (1897), with a sequel, Robert Orange (1900).