Richard Calmady is born into English aristocracy with a physical disability that becomes the organizing principle of his entire life. It shapes how others see him, how he sees himself, his mother’s suffocating devotion, the erotic possibilities that open and close around him as he moves into adulthood.
Lucas builds the novel around a triangle of desire. Richard’s cousin is part of it. The lesbian content isn’t isolated or foregrounded—it’s woven into the structure of desire itself, one thread among multiple threads that all pull in different directions.
Published in 1901, *The History of Sir Richard Calmady* was a bestseller. Then it disappeared the way much women’s writing from the period disappeared—lost to the machinery that decided which books mattered and which ones could be forgotten. This Bloomsbury Academic edition restores it, part of a series recovering late Victorian and early Modernist women writers whose work is being read again with fresh attention.
Lucas writes with the psychological ambition of the late Victorian novel at its best. The prose is dense. The interior lives of characters are mapped with precision. The book demands something from the reader—the willingness to move slowly through complicated psychological terrain, to hold multiple desires and contradictions in mind simultaneously. The effort pays. What emerges is a novel about disability, desire, class, and the ways those forces shape a human life across decades. The writing justifies every sentence it asks you to read.
Details
| ISBN: 9781902459301 |
| Subtitle: |
| Genre: Fiction; Grier Rated; Romance |
| Subject(s): Cousins – Fiction; Lesbians – Fiction; Mothers and sons – Fiction; People with disabilities – Fiction |
| Publication Date: 2003-08-01 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic |
| Language: English |
| Format: Paperback |
| Pages: 472 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: Malet Lucas was the pen name of Mary Kingsley, niece of the explorer and writer Mary Kingsley. She was one of the more commercially successful women novelists of the 1890s and early 1900s, and her work is increasingly examined for its treatment of disability, gender, and sexuality. This edition includes critical apparatus placing the novel in its literary and historical context. The series it belongs to — Late Victorian and Early Modernist Women Writers — is a Bloomsbury Academic recovery project of considerable scholarly value. |
| Book_ID: 106149 |