Florence Henniker

[2][3] She was named in memory of her father's frustrated love affair with the Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale, a family friend who also was her godmother.

[6] As a young woman Florence also spent time in Paris with her governess Matilda Allen, where she received singing lessons and attended lectures at the Sorbonne.

[8] Bid Me Good-bye (1892) tells the story of a heroine, Mary Gifford, whose four suitors all prove unacceptable, leaving her single at the novel's conclusion, and liberated.

Perhaps Henniker's most daring work, Foiled (1893) depicts a glutted English aristocracy on the verge of collapse, feminizes some of her masculine characters and over-masculinizes others, and presents a society in which men and women live in irretrievably separate spheres.

"[16] Her final novel was Second Fiddle (1912), which Coulson Kernahan claimed pictures, "truthfully, the fashionable life which has been written about, preached about, gossiped about, and gasped about in the books, sermons, and plays that profess to portray the "Sins of Society.

[21] In 1898, the Spectator described her novel Sowing the Sand as a book "conform[ing] generally to the type long ago established by Ouida, which in our young days used to be accounted improper, but is now food for babes.

"[22] Reviewing her collection of short stories Contrasts in 1903, the same magazine said its contents showed "much insight into character, and an almost inhuman power of devising heartrending situations in everyday life.

"[23] However, Richard Sylva (Eastern Illinois University) has claimed that in contemporary times, owing to Henniker's collaboration with Hardy, which overshadowed her own writing career, modernist literature overtaking the romance novel genre in terms of being considered high art, and exclusion from the Dictionary of National Biography, Henniker would be virtually unknown except for her connection to "three well-known men...her father, Lord Houghton, her brother...later second Lord Houghton, and her literary collaborator and rejected paramour, Thomas Hardy.