Violet Fane

  • Born: February 24, 1843
  • Birthplace: Sussex, England
  • Died: October 13, 1905
  • Place of death: Harrogate, England

Biography

Born Mary Montgomery Lamb to an aristocratic family related to the Earl of Rochester, Violet Fane took her pseudonym from Benjamin Disreali’s 1826 novel Vivian Grey. Fane did not become Lady Currie until after the 1893 death of her first husband, the Irish landowner Henry S. Singleton, when she married diplomat Sir Philip Henry Currie, who served as British ambassador to Constantinople from 1843 to 1898 and as ambassador to Rome from 1898 to 1903. Little is known about Fane’s’s personal life other than that she had four children, two sons and two daughters, by her first marriage. For her part, however, Fane, who wrote as both fane and Lamb, contributed to the popular understanding of British upper-class life during the Victorian era. At regular intervals, she produced slim volumes of poetry devoted to romantic and sentimental subjects that were read by both society matrons and milkmaids—even if they received only mild praise from reviewers. Fane also exhibited an interest in historical subjects that led to Anthony Babington (1877), a verse drama set in the time of Elizabeth I, and to her translation of Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre (1892). Her interest in the latter subject, Fane wrote, grew out of Queen Marguerite’s bad reputation, an interest echoed faintly feminist tone of the essay “Two Moods of a Man,” which also appeared in 1892. It is for these late-career essays—with their clear observation of her times—that Fane is most remembered.