Lucas Malet

[1] Malet scholar Talia Schaffer notes that she was "widely regarded as one of the premier writers of fiction in the English-speaking world"[2] at the height of her career, but her reputation declined by the end of her life and today she is rarely read or studied.

At the height of her popularity she was "compared favorably to Thomas Hardy, and Henry James, with sales rivaling Rudyard Kipling.

"[2] Malet's fin de siecle novels offer "detailed, sensitive investigations of the psychology of masochism, perverse desires, unconventional gender roles, and the body.

"[2] She was born at the rectory in Eversley, Hampshire, the younger daughter of Reverend Charles Kingsley (author of The Water Babies) and his wife Frances Eliza Grenfell, the third of the couple's four children.

Despite her tremendous critical and economic success during the height of her career, Malet died in penury at the home of a friend in Wales on 27 October 1931.

[4][8] The late nineteenth century English author George Gissing thought it 'a wooden book, without a living character or touching scene.

Her last novel, The Private Life of Mr. Justice Syme, was completed after the author's death by her companion Gabrielle Vallings, and published in August 1932.

[6] Biographer Patricia Lorimer Lundberg attributes Malet's swift decline in reputation to multiple factors including the author's confusing sexual and gender politics and an "evolving modernist style" that "met with sloppy reviews that endeavored to push her back into Victorianism.

Talia Schaffer notes that Lundberg's book re-constructs historical gaps in the author's life created both by critical neglect and Malet's own actions (she asked Vallings to burn her personal papers, for example.

[note 3] The book tells the story of a small boy who befriends a very ugly and socially-despised man, who saves him in the end.