Lucas Malet, a Victorian novelist, and other name know as Mary St Leger Kingsley. Her works, The Wages of Sin (1891) and The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901), were particularly popular. Malet historian Talia Schaffer says that she was "widely regarded as one of the premier writers of fiction in the English-speaking world" at the zenith of her career, but her reputation dwindled by the end of her life, and she is now rarely read or studied. She was born in the rectory in Eversley, Hampshire, as the younger daughter of Reverend Charles Kingsley (author of The Water Babies) and his wife Frances Eliza Grenfell, the couple's third child. In 1876, Mary married the Rev. William Harrison, her father's colleague, Minor Canon of Westminster, and Queen's Priest-in-Ordinary. Malet abandoned his artistic ambitions following the marriage. The marriage was childless and miserable, and the couple separated soon after. Following her divorce, Malet pursued an independent writing career, adopting her pen name by combining two obscure family surnames. Her debut novel, Mrs. Lorimer, a Sketch in Black and White, was released in 1882. Malet's second novel, Colonel Enderby's Wife, published in 1885, drew critical notice and admiration for its fictionalization of her brief failed marriage. Five years after her husband died, Kingsley converted to Catholicism.
