Description
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?’
Table of Contents
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
