John Oliver Hobbes

Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie (November 3, 1867 – August 13, 1906) was an Anglo-American novelist and dramatist who wrote under the pen-name of John Oliver Hobbes. Though her work fell out of print in the twentieth-century, her first book Some Emotions and a Moral was a sensation in its day, selling eighty-thousand copies in only a few weeks.

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she was the eldest daughter of the businessman John Morgan Richards and his wife Laura Hortense (née Arnold). Her father had Calvinist roots and her grandfather was a Presbyterian minister. The family moved to London soon after her birth, and she was educated in London and Paris. When she was nineteen, she married Reginald Walpole Craigie, by whom she had one son, John Churchill Craigie: but the marriage proved an unhappy one, and was dissolved on her petition in July 1895. She was brought up as a Nonconformist, but in 1892 was received into the Roman Catholic Church, of which she remained a devout and serious member. Her successful career as a novelist and playwright also made her a popular socialite with as diverse associates as George Tyrrell and Aubrey Beardsley, as well as George Moore, whose lover she had been.

From 1900, Mrs Craigie lived and worked at her villa near her parents' home at Steephill, Isle of Wight. The villa is now called Craigie Lodge and bears a small commemorative plaque memorializing Mrs Craigie's time there. In 1906, she died suddenly of heart failure in London en route to a holiday in Scotland.

Her first little book, the epigrammatic , was published in 1891 in Mr Fisher Unwin's Pseudonym Library. With its accounts of unhappy marriage and infidelity, it was an immediate hit; and was followed by similarly bohemian novels like (1892), (1893), (1894), The Gods, Some Mortals, and Lord Wickenham. The Herb Moon (1896), a country love story, was followed by The School for Saints (1897), with a sequel, Robert Orange (1900).

Her novels were guyed in a contemporary verse:

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