HOW "LUCAS MALET" WRITES HER NOVELS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2389, 14 December 1899, Page 56

HOW "LUCAS MALET" WRITES HER NOVELS.

An interview with the writer known to tip world as " Lucas Malet " is contributed by Mary Angela Dickens to the October number of the Windsor Magazine. " Lucas Malet," as distinct from Charles Kingsley's daughter, came into existence with the production of " Mrs Lorimer." Up to this time it had seemed probable that her power .•would find an outlet on other lines — that she would become a painter. She studied as a girl in the Slade school, and did very jwell there. She had never tried her hand at fiction until she began "Mrs Lorimer." She began it because she was dreadfully dull, and wanted a little meney ; and she knew at once she had found her line. She (has written only a few books as yet, partly fcecause Nature has enclosed her powerful personality in a delicate body, and she has £ad much ill-health. And she declares that she has no rush of plots. But the plots always have been, and probably always >vill be, ready to her hand when she wants fchem. "Where do they come from?" she says. " Ah, who knows? I sometimes wonder .Whether our plots belong to people w;ho Slave lived before vs — our ancestors, you Jcnow, or something of that kind. There's iio such thing as spontaneous generation, we know. They must have a beginning. They must come from somewhere. How are they suggested to us? " ' A very fascinating theory is this, and in its curiously scientific lone and the mat-Jter-of-fact directness with which it is propounded, one traces the result of that early training in science which has had a distinct influence on Lucas Malet. It is Very curious to see it working hand-in-hand (with the imaginative faculty, but it prefeents itself again in connection with her characters. "I never take nry characters from real people," she says. "I suppose nobody ever do.es.. But/ of course,, I often found

a character on some trait or mood that I have observed perhaps in a casual acquaintance. And it has happened to me over and over again when I've done this that people have come to me and said, ' Oh, but you must have meant So-and-so in that character, because I've actually heard him say such-and-such a thing ' ■ — something which I had certainly never heard So-and-so say, but which had come naturally to the character rounded on some other slight trait which I had noticed in him. I suppose it comes of a scientific reasoning faculty — one argues things out with a deadly pre- | cision. Given certain premises, certain rej* suits are inevitable."

As to her methods, Lucas Malet is very simple and infinitely painstaking. She spends a day or two with her plot, and then she begins to write. The whole thing growstogether, so to speak, and though the characters develop as the work goes on, she never changes, or wishes to change, the lines of the plot. She writes and rewrites as she goes ; and then when the book is finished, she writes it over -again, and yet again, until she finds herself as near her own ideal as an artist may ever hope to be. When she has finished her story, she takes her. holiday after her own fashion — she travels.

The true spirit of the traveller is in her, inasmuch as she is never so happy as when she is wondering over the face of the earth. But the true spirit of the traveller is not in her, inasmuch as she has no inclination whatever to rough ir. She likes to go comfortably. She has been over the usual European ground; of qourse, and .'•he has also spent some time in India, seeing the country and the people, " not only on the surface, but " from the inside," as she herself expresses it.

With reference to her book, " The Carissima," she has a very distinct recollection of the manner in which, the idea of the hunting dog, by Avhose presence the fever-ridden hero is cursed, occurred to her. " I was standing in the doorway of the rectory of Clcvellv one night," she says, " and I saw, galloping up the drive towards me, two green eyes. It was quite dark, and I couldn't see anything else for the moment bul just these eyes moving towards me. Directly afterwards I saw it was my own dog, but it Avas very ghostly at the time, and I tried to see how it would work into a story. 1 couldn't get it then; but afterwards, when I had been ill myself, and knew what fever and delirium meant, I saw what would become of it."