From the 1880s through the early 1900s Lucas Malet, the pseudonym of Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison, was regarded as a major literary figure whose reputation was certain to survive the test of time. In bookshops and in circulating libraries, the reading public clamored for Malet's latest novel; demand was particularly great for The Wages of Sin: A Novel (1891) and The History of Sir Richard Calmady: A Romance (1901). At the same time, those professional critics who constituted the literary establishment were alarmed by Malet's powerful treatment of such "morbid" themes as illicit sexuality, physical deformity, emotional sadism, self-sacrificing masochism, the misogyny of English middle-class culture, and the reality of the supernatural. Critics agonized over how much latitude should be allowed a woman writer and struggled to assign Malet to a recognizably "English" tradition of fiction. In the 1880s Malet's fiction was compared to that of George Eliot, while...