Mary Elizabeth Hawker (28 January 1848 – 16 June 1908) was a Scottish-born writer of short fiction. From 1890, she wrote under the pseudonym Lanoe Falconer.Elizabeth Lee: "Hawker, Mary Elizabeth seud. Lanoe Falconer (Oxford: OUP, 2004
Retrieved 26 July 2018.
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Early years and education

Mary Elizabeth Hawker was born on 29 January 1848 at

Inveraray Inveraray ( or ; gd, Inbhir Aora meaning "mouth of the Aray") is a town in Argyll and Bute, Scotland. It is on the western shore of Loch Fyne, near its head, and on the A83 road. It is a former royal burgh, the traditional county town of Arg ...

Argyll Argyll (; archaically Argyle, in modern Gaelic, ), sometimes called Argyllshire, is a historic county and registration county of western Scotland. Argyll is of ancient origin, and corresponds to most of the part of the ancient kingdom of ...

shire, as the oldest daughter of Major Peter William Lanoe Hawker (1812–1857) of the 74th Highlanders, resident at Longparish House near Whitchurch, Hampshire, and Elizabeth Eraser. Her grandfather was Lieutenant Colonel

Peter Hawker Colonel Peter Hawker (24 November 1786 – 7 August 1853) was a celebrated diarist and author, and a shooting sportsman accounted one of the "great shots" of the 19th century. His sporting exploits were widely followed and on occasion considered ...

, author of ''Instructions to Young Sportsmen'' published in 1841. Hawker's education was informal and mainly self-chosen, as she read many books. Her father died in 1857 and her mother remarried in 1862 to Herbert Fennell, with whom the daughter had a poor relationship. The family lived in France and Germany, where Hawker became proficient in both languages. She was also a pianist.

Career

Hawker began to write early in life, a few of her stories and essays appearing in magazines and newspapers. Her first major work, in 1890, was the initial volume of a series of novels included by Fisher Unwin in the ''Pseudonym Library'': a story by Hawker entitled ''Mademoiselle Ixe'', "by Lanoe Falconer". This had been rejected by several other publishers. Her pen name combines an anagram of "Alone" and a synonym for her surname. The story is a mystery about a heroine who is a governess in an English country house connected with Russian

nihilist Nihilism (; ) is a philosophy, or family of views within philosophy, that rejects generally accepted or fundamental aspects of human existence, such as objective truth, knowledge, morality, values, or meaning. The term was popularized by Ivan ...

s. The ''Saturday Review'' declared it to be "one of the finest short stories in England".

Gladstone William Ewart Gladstone ( ; 29 December 1809 – 19 May 1898) was a British statesman and Liberal politician. In a career lasting over 60 years, he served for 12 years as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, spread over four non-conse ...

wrote and spoke in praise of the book. Its circulation was forbidden in Russia. She gave her royalties from it to help Russian exiles. Over 40,000 copies of the English editions were sold and an American edition was printed, as were translations into French, German, Dutch, and Italian. She then published ''Cecilia de Noel,'' a

ghost story A ghost story is any piece of fiction, or drama, that includes a ghost, or simply takes as a premise the possibility of ghosts or characters' belief in them."Ghost Stories" in Margaret Drabble (ed.), ''Oxford Companion to English Literature'' ...

, and ''The Hotel d'Angleterre'', both in 1891. Her final book, ''Old Hampshire Vignettes'', appeared in 1907. Hawker's productivity declined after her mother died on 23 May 1901, as she struggled to maintain her own mental and physical health. She died of

consumption Consumption may refer to: *Resource consumption *Tuberculosis, an infectious disease, historically * Consumption (ecology), receipt of energy by consuming other organisms * Consumption (economics), the purchasing of newly produced goods for curren ...

on 16 June 1908 at Broxwood Court,

Herefordshire Herefordshire () is a county in the West Midlands of England, governed by Herefordshire Council. It is bordered by Shropshire to the north, Worcestershire to the east, Gloucestershire to the south-east, and the Welsh counties of Monmouthshire ...

and was buried at

Lyonshall Lyonshall is a historic village and civil parish in Herefordshire, England. The civil parish includes the hamlet of Penrhos, Herefordshire, Penrhos. According to the United Kingdom Census 2001, 2001 Census, the civil parish had a population of ...

in the same county. Her nephew – son of her sister, Julia Gordon Lanoe Hawker, and her husband, Henry Colley Hawker, a distant cousin – was the aviator

Lanoe Hawker Lanoe George Hawker, (30 December 1890 – 23 November 1916) was a British flying ace of the First World War. Having seven credited victories, he was the third pilot to receive the Victoria Cross, the highest decoration for gallantry awar ...

Selected works

*''Mademoiselle Ixe'', 1890 *''Cecilia de Noël'', 1891 *''The Hôtel d'Angleterre and other stories'', 1891 *''Old Hampshire Vignettes'', 1907 Her collected stories were published with an introduction by Peter Rowland in 2010.''The Collected Stories of Lanoe Falconer'', ed. with an intro. by Peter Rowland, Academic Press, 2010.

References

Attribution

External links

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Lanoe Falconer (Mary Elizabeth Hawker) (1848–1908)
at the Salamanca Corpus {{DEFAULTSORT:Hawker, Mary Elizabeth 1848 births 1908 deaths 19th-century British novelists 19th-century English women writers 19th-century British writers 19th-century British short story writers English short story writers English women novelists British women short story writers Pseudonymous women writers People from Herefordshire People from Inveraray 19th-century pseudonymous writers