Mary Montgomerie, Lady Currie (née Lamb, 24 February 1843 – 13 October 1905), known by the literary pseudonym Violet Fane, was an English poet, writer, and later an ambassadress.

[2] As a well-known figure in London society, Fane's coterie included famous literary personas such as Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, A. W. Kinglake, Alfred Austin, James McNeil Whistler, Lillie Langtry, and Oscar Wilde, who praised the oracular bent of Fane's opinions on 'the relation of art to nature' by saying that she ‘live[d] between Parnassus and Piccadilly’.

[5] Her mother, was the daughter of a draper, Mr Grey and was considered a great beauty.Charlie and Charlotte eloped in secret, and got married first in Edinburgh, and then in London to validate the legitimacy of their marriage.

When Fane was born a few years later, the couple sent their (then one-month-old) daughter to her paternal grandparents with a note that explained their secret marriage and asking for their forgiveness.

[6] As a token of their good intentions, Charlie and Charlotte presented the baby to Sir Charles and Lady Mary as their granddaughter.

Her parents went abroad for a year-long honeymoon, and returned to join Fane and her grandparents in Beauport as devotees of the oriental life.

The biographical note that is situated at the beginning of her 1892 collection, Poems, mentions Fane's early poetic calling, and declares: It is interesting to note, in these days when hereditary influences cannot be disregarded, that “Violet Fane” descends, upon her father’s side, from the houses of Seton, Somerville, and Montgomerie, in Scotland, and from the old Provençal family of Montolieu in France, several of whose members were authors of distinction; and that […] she can claim kinship with the witty and eccentric John, Earl of Rochester, whose poetic talent was not always turned to the use of edifying.

A year before she was to marry Singleton, several etchings by her appeared in an illustrated edition of Alfred Lord Tennyson's 1830 poem, Mariana, which seems to have been published privately in 1863.

Her family's disapproval of her writing pushed Fane to assume a nom de plume when she started publishing poetry.

She then contradicts herself, however, by explaining that the reason she chose the name ‘Violet Fane’ for her literary purposes was because the character ‘died in the arms of her lover’ and a death like that was ‘worth living for’ (‘Remarkable People’, p. 629).