[Harriet Parr], ‘The Works of Mrs Gaskell’, British Quarterly Review (April 1867)

Harriet Parr (1828-1900), critic and novelist, was more widely known by her pseudonym Holme Lee, under which she wrote over thirty novels. Born and raised in York, she published her first novel, Maude Talbot in 1854, and by 1857 had attracted the notice of Marian Evans, the future George Eliot who was at that time writing the ‘Belles Lettres’ section for the Westminster Review. Eliot’s review of Kathie Brand (1856) praised its ‘absence of affectation, maudlin sentimentality, and dogmatic assertions on philosophical, political, and religious points’, but complained that ‘as a story, it is neither new nor entertaining’. Even the novel’s two most sensational events - a shipwreck, and the burning of York Minster - seem to Eliot inadequately realised: ‘the author writes about them, does not paint them’ (Westminister Review, New Series 11 (January 1857), p. 321). If reviewing the novel helped Eliot formulate her own concept of realism, as she sensed what was wrong with Holme Lee’s work, Lee herself continued writing in much the same vein, combining a sound moral tone with enough sensationalism to vary their domestic familiarity, notwithstanding Eliot’s parting advice to be ‘more vigilant of commonplace and facile invention’ (ibid, p. 322). Remaining unmarried, she undertook occasional literary reviews, and children’s stories, and also wrote a life of Joan of Arc. Her later novels included For Richer, For Poorer (1870), The Beautiful Miss Barrington (1871), and Straightforward (1878).