John Oliver Hobbes

John Oliver Hobbes was the pen name of Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie (1867–1906), born in Boston and brought to England as a child. Her first novel, Some Emotions and a Moral (1891), written soon after a brief, unhappy marriage ended in divorce, sold some eighty thousand copies within weeks and made her a literary sensation under her pseudonym. She went on to write further novels — including The School for Saints (1897) and its sequel Robert Orange (1900) — as well as plays produced in London's West End, and was a prominent figure in literary and society circles, close to George Moore, George Meredith and Henry James among others. She died in London at thirty-eight.