author
Margaret Veley
1843–1887
A gifted Victorian novelist and poet, she built a small but admired body of work that moved from wit and romance toward a more reflective, melancholy tone. Her fiction and verse appeared in major magazines before her life was cut short in 1887.
2 Audiobooks
Mitchelhurst Place: A Novel. Vol. 2 (of 2)
by Margaret Veley
Mitchelhurst Place: A Novel. Vol. 1 (of 2)
by Margaret Veley
About the author
Born in Braintree, Essex, in 1843, Margaret Veley was a British author and poet who was educated mainly at home. She published fiction and poetry in well-known periodicals during the 1870s and 1880s, and her writing earned a reputation for polish, feeling, and quiet intelligence.
Her books include For Percival (1878), Damocles (1882), Mitchelhurst Place (1884), and A Garden of Memories (1887). After her death, a volume of her poetry, A Marriage of Shadows, was published in 1888. Contemporary accounts note that the losses of close family members darkened the mood of some of her later work.
Veley never married and died on December 7, 1887, at just forty-four. Although she is less widely known today than some of her Victorian peers, her novels and poems still offer a distinctive mix of emotional restraint, subtle humor, and sadness.