Lucas Malet was the pseudonym of Mary St Leger Kingsley (1852-1931), a Victorian novelist. Of her novels, The Wages of Sin and The History of Sir Richard Calmady were especially popular. Malet's early novels were genteel Victorian romances, but by the 1890s she was using the ideas of the aesthetic movement to explore more transgressive themes, such as adultery and sadism. Her later novels are proto-modernist in their explorations of marginal consciousnesses. Malet is most often compared to Henry James and Thomas Hardy.