Lucas Malet

Lucas Malet was the pen name of Mary St Leger Kingsley (1852–1931), an English novelist, the younger daughter of the clergyman and writer Charles Kingsley. She studied art at the Slade School before marrying a clergyman, William Harrison, from whom she later separated. Her novels, beginning with Mrs. Lorimer (1882) and including Colonel Enderby's Wife, The Wages of Sin and The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901), were admired for their psychological seriousness and attacked for their frankness about sexuality and the body. She converted to Catholicism in 1902 and completed her father's unfinished novel The Tutor's Story. In her day she was ranked with Hardy and Henry James.