Mrs. W.K. Clifford

Biography

Brtitish novelist, poet and playwright Mrs. W.K. Clifford was born Lucy Lane in Barbados, British West Indies, in 1846. In 1875 she married writer William Kingdon Clifford, and they settled in England. Although he was only in his early 30s, Kingdon's health began to fail and the couple moved to the Mediterranean in 1878. The new change in climate seemed to improve his health, but upon their return to England it began to decline rapidly. Another move to Portugal didn't help, and he died in March of 1879. She was left with two children and little money, but her friendship with writer George Eliot resulted in Eliot's helping her both financially and professionally; it was through Eliot's efforts that Clifford had her first works published in "The Standard", and for the next few years she was a regular contributor to that publication. Her first novel, "Mrs. Keith's Crime", was published in 1885, but it didn't carry her name; it wasn't until the work was in its second printing that her name appeared on it. Over the following years she wrote in a variety of genres--plays, short stories, novels, poems--and she became a favorite of many of the finest writers of the day, among them Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling and James Russell Lowell. She died in London, England, on April 21, 1929.