John Oliver Hobbes

John Oliver Hobbes was the pen name of Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie (1867–1906), an American-born novelist and dramatist who lived in England from infancy. The daughter of a patent-medicine millionaire, she married at nineteen, separated, took a degree at University College London and in 1891 published Some Emotions and a Moral, a short, witty novel that made her famous overnight. She converted to Catholicism in 1892 and divorced in 1895. The School for Saints (1897) and its sequel Robert Orange (1900) are her most ambitious works, novels of religious conversion set in Disraeli's England. She also wrote successful comedies for the stage and died suddenly at thirty-eight.