Harriet Parr

Harriet Parr (1828–1900) was a British author of the Victorian era, who wrote under the pseudonym Holme Lee.

Biography

The daughter of a commercial traveler, Parr was born in the English city of York on 31 January 1828.[1] She never married and worked initially as a governess before finding success as a writer with her first book, Maude Talbot, in 1854. From then until 1883, Parr produced approximately one novel a year, all published by the London firm Smith, Elder & Co., under the pen name Holme Lee. Charles Dickens, having enjoyed one of Parr’s early books, purchased three stories from her for the Christmas numbers of his weekly magazines.[2] One of these included a hymn that would later be republished in various Protestant hymnals in Britain and the United States.[3] Parr also wrote several volumes of fairy tales for children, plus some works of non-fiction, most of the latter under her real name.

She lived for many years at Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, where she died on 18 February 1900.[4]

Reception

Although Parr is now—like most Victorian authors—almost entirely forgotten, her work sold well during her lifetime and was generally well reviewed. Many of her books went through more than one edition, and several were also published in America. At least one was picked up by the Leipzig firm of Bernhard Tauchnitz, which specialized in inexpensive English-language paperbacks for travelers. Aiding Parr’s success was the fact that she was a favorite author of the founder of Victorian London’s largest lending library, Charles Edward Mudie, “to whose sense of decency her fiction strictly conformed with its depictions of shy maidens and their decent love problems.”[5]

Writings

Notes

  1. ↑  Polard, Albert Frederick (1901). "Parr, Harriet". In Sidney Lee. Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement​. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  2. ↑ Lillian Nayder, Unequal partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian authorship (Ithaca, NY, 2002), xi, 28, 36, 133n.
  3. ↑ John Julian, A dictionary of hymnology, 2d ed. (London, 1907), 882.
  4. ↑  Polard, Albert Frederick (1901). "Parr, Harriet". In Sidney Lee. Dictionary of National Biography, 1901 supplement​. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
  5. ↑ John Sutherland, The Stanford companion to Victorian fiction (Stanford, 1989), 491.

External links

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