Violet Fane

Beauport Park.

Violet Fane was the literary pseudonym of Mary, Baroness Currie, née Mary Montgomerie Lamb (24 February 1843, Beauport Park – 13 October 1905, Harrogate), a British novelist, poet and essayist of Victorian era.

Biography

She was the daughter of Charles James Savile Montgomerie Lamb and Anna Gray from Beauport Park, and took her pen name from Benjamin Disraeli's novel Vivian Grey (1826). In 1864 she married her first husband, Henry Sydenham Singleton, with whom she had four children. After Singleton's death in 1893, she married (24 January 1894) her second husband, Sir Philip Currie, later created Baron Currie (1899). Currie was Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1889 to 1893 and then Ambassador to Rome from 1898 to 1903, where Mary lived with him.

• W. H. Mallock dedicated his novel The New Republic (1877) to Fane. She can be found as Mrs. Sinclair.

Books

• as Violet Fane:
  • From Dawn to Noon, 1872, poetry
  • Denzil Place, 1875, poetry (reprinted as Constance's Fate: A Story of Denzil Place)
  • The Queen of the Fairies, 1876, poetry
  • Anthony Babington, 1877, drama in verse
  • Autumn Songs, 1889, poetry
  • Under Cross and Crescent, 1896, poetry
  • Betwixt two Seas, 1900, poetry
  • Sophy, 1881, novel
  • Thro' Love and War, 1886, novel
  • The Story of Helen Davenant, 1889, novel
• as Mary Currie:
  • Are Remarkable People Remarkable Looking, 1904, essay
  • The Feast of Kebobs, 1904, autobiographical essay
• translator:
  • Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre, 1892

External links

• Dictionary of Literary Biography on Violet Fane
• Fane's poem In Green Old Gardens