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-siècle 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?'
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Brief Chronology of Lucas Malet's Life and Works
Foreword: Patricia Lorimer Lundberg
Reading Malet "through the eyelashes": An Introduction to her Life and Work.
JANE FORD AND ALEXANDRA GRAY
Maletian Bodies
1. Hysterical Bodies and Gothic Spaces: Lucas Malet's "Moral Dissecting-Room."
LOUISE BENSON JAMES
2. "That very ugly saddle": Disability, Adaptation and Paternal Inheritance in The History of Sir Richard Calmady.
CLARE WALKER GORE
3. "Vanity of Vanities": The Bildungsroman, Corporeal Fragility and the Aesthetic Ideal in The Far Horizon.
ALANI HICKS-BARTLETT
Dissident Women
4. Mad Dogs and English (New) Women: Grotesque Gender in The Carissima.
ALEXANDRA GRAY
5. Cosmopolitan Romance and Feminist Aestheticism in Adrian Savage.
CATHERINE DELYFER
6. The Authorial Ambition of Deadham Hard: Reimagining Womanhood, Profession and Desire.
CRESCENT RAINWATER
Malet and her Contemporaries
7. Reorienting the Bildungsroman: Progress Narratives, Queerness and Disability in The History of Sir Richard Calmady and Jude the Obscure.
JILL EHNENN
8. Some Chapter of Some Other Story: Henry James, Lucas Malet, and the Real Past of The Sense of the Past.
TALIA SCHAFFER
Catholic (proto-)Modernism
9. Against the English Nation: The ideological Proto-modernism of The Far Horizon.
HOLLY LAIRD
10. "Undecode-able wireless signals": Telepathy and Contamination in The Survivors.
JANE FORD
Appendix
In Memoriam, Ernest D. Chesterfield.
LUCAS MALET
Telling the Untold Stories: Lucas Malet's Critique of an Aesthetic Trope.
RUTH ROBBINS
