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." Malet's fin de siecle novels offer "detailed, sensitive investigations of the psychology of masochism, perverse desires, unconventional gender roles, and the body."
Early years
She was born at the rectory in Eversley, Hampshire, the younger daughter of Reverend Charles Kingsley (author of The Water Babies) and his wife Frances Eliza Grenfell, the third of the couple's four children. 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.
Career
In 1876, she married the Rev. William Harrison, 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. The marriage was childless and unhappy, and the couple soon separated. After the separation, Malet embarked on an independent writing career, forming her pen name by combining two little-known family names. Her first novel, Mrs. Lorimer, a Sketch in Black and White, was published in 1882. 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.
