Mary Eliza Kennard

Mary Eliza Kennard (1850–1936) was an English novelist and writer of non-fiction. Most of her work was published under the name of Mrs Edward Kennard.

Kennard specialised in stories of the English country house world of hunting, shooting, and fishing, and in her heyday was dubbed "the Diana of fiction", in honour of Diana, the Roman goddess of hunting.

Often reported incorrectly as being a daughter of Samuel Laing, Mary Eliza was in fact the daughter of Charles Wilson Faber by his marriage to Mary Beckett, a daughter of Sir Edmund Beckett, 4th Baronet. Her father was a director of the Great Northern Railway and the Metropolitan Railway, and she was brought up at Northaw, Hertfordshire, where she was educated at home by governesses. She had three notable brothers, Edmund Faber, 1st Baron Faber (1850–1920), Denison Faber, 1st Baron Wittenham (1852–1931), and Walter Vavasour Faber (1857–1928), a member of parliament.

In 1870 Mary Eliza married Edward Kennard, himself once a journalist, who became a landed gentleman by buying the Barn Estate on the borders of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire from the 18th Earl of Shrewsbury. This property was centred on a country house called The Barn at Little Bowden, one mile from the town of Market Harborough. Kennard had two sons in the 1870s, Lionel and Malcolm, and her first stories were written for them and were published in a volume called Twilight Tales. She took up writing in earnest to occupy her mind after her sons went away to school.

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