M.M. Kaye

Mary Margaret ('Mollie') Kaye (21 August 1908 – 29 January 2004) was a British writer. Her most famous book is The Far Pavilions (1978).

M. M. Kaye was born in Simla, India, the elder daughter and one of three children born to Sir Cecil Kaye and his wife Margaret Sarah Bryson. Cecil Kaye was an intelligence officer in the Indian Army; and M. M. Kaye's grandfather, brother and husband all served the British Raj: her grandfather's cousin, Sir John Kaye, wrote the standard accounts of the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the First Afghan War. At age ten Mollie Kaye - as M. M. Kaye was known - was sent to England to attend boarding school, subsequently studying children's book illustration earning money by designing Christmas cards. In 1926 she briefly returned to live with her family in India but after her father's death Kaye, displeased by her mother's pressure to find a junior officer to marry, returned to England living in London on a small pension based on her late father's army career augmented first by earnings from illustrating children's books, and from 1937 from the publication of children's books written by Kaye herself. Kaye's first adult novel: Six Bars at Seven, was published in 1940, being a thriller which Kaye was moved to write due to regularly reading books of that ilk from the Fourpenny Library: (quote) "Most of the stuff I was reading was total rubbish, and I used to think I couldn't write worse. So I sat down and wrote one."

The £64 she received for Six Bars at Seven enabled Kaye to return to Simla where she resided with her married sister Dorothy Elizabeth Pardey. In June 1941 Kaye met her future husband: British Indian Army officer Godfrey John Hamilton, four years her junior, who reportedly proposed to Kaye on five days acquaintance. Kaye was pregnant with the couple's second child when she and Hamilton were able to marry on Armistice Day 1945, Hamilton's first marriage having by then been dissolved, and following her second child's 1946 birth Kaye returned to writing. (Hamilton's first wife Mary Penelope Colthurst resided in Ireland with the couple's daughter. Kaye would later state of her affair with Hamilton: "We just couldn't wait. Had it been peacetime, I wouldn't have done it because of the way I had been brought up. But these were the pressures of war.") Subsequent to the 1947 dissolution of the British India Army attendant on India's achieving home rule, Hamilton had transferred to the British army where his career necessitated he and his family relocate twenty-seven times over the next nineteen years, with Kaye utilizing several of these locales in a series of crime novels which inaugurated the utilization of the pen name M. M. Kaye, the writer's previous published works having been credited to Mollie Kaye. Kaye's literary agent was Paul Scott who had been an army officer in India and who would find fame as author of the Raj Quartet. It was with Scott's encouragement that Kaye wrote her first historical epic of India Shadow of the Moon published in 1957. The focal background of Shadow of the Moon is the Sepoy Mutiny with which Kaye had been familiarized via stories heard as a child from her family's native servants, this early interest being reinforced in the mid-1950s when Kaye on a visit to friends in India chanced on some transcripts of trials attendant on the Sepoy Mutiny in a shed on her friends' property. Kaye would later state her displeasure over the original published version of Shadow of the Moon being edited without her knowledge, with sections focused on action rather than romance being largely deleted.

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