author
Holme Lee
1828–1900
A prolific Victorian novelist who wrote under the pen name Holme Lee, she built a wide readership with domestic fiction full of feeling, moral choice, and closely observed everyday life. She also wrote for children and kept publishing steadily across much of the nineteenth century.
1 Audiobook
The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax
by Holme Lee
About the author
Born Harriet Parr in York on January 31, 1828, she became known to readers as Holme Lee. Before her literary career took off, she worked as a governess, and that experience seems to have fed the strong interest in family life, social position, and women’s choices that runs through her fiction.
Her first novel, Maude Talbot, appeared in 1854, and she went on to publish many more books, including Gilbert Massinger, Kathie Brande, and Sylvan Holt’s Daughter. Writing in the Victorian period, she was admired for stories that were emotional without losing sight of ordinary character and conscience, and she also produced children’s writing along with other prose works.
Parr never married and spent much of her life earning her living through literature. She died on February 18, 1900, leaving behind a substantial body of fiction that gives modern readers a lively window into nineteenth-century English tastes, values, and domestic drama.