The Unobstrusive Miss Hawker — Peter Rowland

Lanoe Falconer ( nom de plume of Mary Elizabeth Hawker) was one of England s most accomplished young writers in the 1890s; her novel Mademoiselle Ixe a bestseller and an international hit. Her short stories and novels were compared favorably to Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell among others. Her promising career was cut short by chronic illness. Peter Rowland began his research by discovering a large mass of Falconer s unpublished material including personal documents. He took this trove as a starting point to reconstruct and review Falconer s work after almost a century of neglect. Falconer left a small enduring body of work and the author has included several of her short stories in this study to introduce researchers and other readers to the literary quality, power and scope of the unobtrusive Miss Hawker .