Clotilde Graves

Clotilde Augusta Inez Mary Graves (3 June 1863 – 3 December 1932), was an Irish author who wrote under the pseudonym of Richard Dehan, and a successful playwright in London and New York City.

Known as Clo Graves, she was born 3 June 1863 at Buttevant Castle, Co. Cork, third daughter of Major William Henry Graves (1825–1892) of the 18th Royal Irish Regiment and Antoinette, daughter of Captain George Anthony Deane of Harwich. She was a second cousin of Alfred Perceval Graves (1846–1931) – son of Rt. Rev. Charles Graves (1812–1899), the mathematician Anglican Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Ahadoe- father of the poet Robert Graves (1895–1985), and his brother Charles Patrick Graves (1899–1971).

At the age of nine, she moved with her family to England from their Irish home. She had seen a good deal of barrack life, and at Alvington Lodge, Granada Street, Southsea, where they went to live, she acquired a large knowledge of both services in the circle of naval and military friends they made there, and this knowledge years afterward she turned to good account in her novel Between Two Thieves.

Educated at a Convent in Lourdes, she converted to Catholicism and came to London where she studied art at Bloomsbury. She was an unusual figure in London society, wearing her hair short, affecting a masculine manner and cut of costume, and smoking cigarettes in public when such characteristics were considered eccentric.

In 1884, Clotilde Graves became an art student and worked at the British Museum galleries and the Royal Female School of Art, helping to support herself by journalism, among other things drawing little pen-and-ink grotesques for the comic papers. She abandoned art and took an engagement in a travelling theatrical company. In 1888 her first chance as a dramatist came. She was again in London, working vigorously at journalism, when some one was needed to write extra lyrics for a pantomime then in preparation. A letter of recommendation from an editor to the manager ended in Miss Clo Graves writing the pantomime of Puss in Boots. Later a tragedy by her, Nitocris, was produced at Drury Lane, and another of her plays, The Mother of Three, proved not only a literary, but also a financial success.

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