Lucas Malet, Dissident Pilgrim: Critical Essays (Among the Victorians and Modernists)

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?' Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Brief Chronology of Lucas Malet’s Life and Works Foreword Reading Malet “through the eyelashes”: An Introduction to Her Life and Work PART 1 Maletian Bodies 1 Hysterical Bodies and Gothic Spaces: Lucas Malet’s “moral dissecting-room” 2 “[T]hat very ugly saddle”: Disability, Adaptation, and Paternal Inheritance in The History of Sir Richard Calmady 3 “Vanity of vanities”: The Bildungsroman, Corporeal Fragility, and the Aesthetic Ideal in The Far Horizon PART 2 Dissident Women 4 Mad Dogs and English (New) Women: Grotesque Gender in The Carissima 5 Cosmopolitan Romance and Feminist Aestheticism in Adrian Savage 6 The Authorial Ambition of Deadham Hard: Reimagining Womanhood, Profession, and Desire PART 3 Malet and Her Contemporaries 7 Reorienting the Bildungsroman: Progress Narratives, Queerness, and Disability in The History of Sir Richard Calmady and Jude the Obscure 8 Some Chapter of Some Other Story: Henry James, Lucas Malet, and the Real Past of The Sense of the Past PART 4 Catholic (Proto-)Modernism 9 Against the English Nation: The Ideological Proto-Modernism of The Far Horizon 10 “[U]ndecode-able wireless signals”: Telepathy and Contamination in The Survivors Appendix A: In Memoriam, Ernest D. Chesterfield Appendix B: Retelling the Untold Stories: Lucas Malet’s Critique of an Aesthetic Trope Index La page de résumé indique : "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?'" "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?'"-- Provided by publisher