Lucas Malet, Dissident Pilgrim: Critical Essays

Book Overview

Popular novelist, female aesthete, Victorian radical and proto-modernist, Lucas Malet (Mary St. Leger Harrison, 1852-1931) was one of the most successful writers of her day, yet few of her remarkable novels remain in print. Malet was a daughter of the 'broad church' priest and well-known Victorian author Charles Kingsley; her sister Rose, uncle, Henry Kingsley and her cousin Mary Henrietta Kingsley were also published authors. Malet was part of a creative dynasty from which she drew inspiration but against which she rebelled both in her personal life and her published work. This collection brings together for the first time a selection of scholarly essays on Malet's life and writing, foregrounding her contributions to nineteenth- and twentieth-century discourses surrounding disability, psychology, religion, sexuality, the New Woman, and decadent, aesthetic and modernist cultural movements. The essays contained in this volume explore Malet's authorial experience--from both within the mainstream of the British literary tradition and, curiously, from outside it--supplementing and nuancing current debates about fin-de-si cle women's writing. The collection asks the question 'who was Lucas Malet?' and 'how--despite its popularity--did her courageous, unique and fascinating writing disappear from view for so long?'

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0367661934
• ISBN13: 9780367661939
• Release Date: September 2020
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"