Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton Read Free

‘Mr Adye’ (sic) and his reluctant workmen, before bringing the legend up to date:
    The discovery of her secret room had no effect upon Lady Ferrers’ spirit, for she continued to wander for many years afterwards, the last record of her appearance being early in the present century, when she was seen by a number of people at a parish tea. 9
    Although brief, Hole’s account in turn provided Magdalen King-Hall with the idea for her fictionalisation of the legend, as she acknowledges in the ‘Author’s Note’ at the beginning of the novel.

    Before discussing the novel in detail, it is worth pausing to place it in the context of King-Hall’s life and career. 10
    Magdalen King-Hall was born on 22 July 1904 in Chelsea, the youngest daughter of Admiral Sir George King-Hall, and his wife Olga (née Ker). 11 The family had a distinguished naval history, dating back to the late eighteenth century. She spent her early years in London, before moving to Australia from 1911–13, where her father was appointed naval commander-in-chief of the Australia station. The family then returned to Britain upon the Admiral’s retirement, and settled in Hove, near Brighton. Having relied on governesses for a rather informal education until this point, King-Hall was sent to boarding school at Downe House in Berkshire, and then to St Leonards school, near St Andrews in Scotland. She spent some time in Switzerland and France, learning to speak French fluently, before returning to live in Hove. It was here, between 1923 and 1924, that she wrote her first novel, though her father bought a house on Tite Street in Chelsea, and the family moved back to London shortly before its publication in 1925.
    This novel,
The Diary of a Young Lady of Fashion, 1764–5
, made an astonishing and unexpected impact, and would remain King-Hall’s most successful work until
Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton
two decades later. It is a playful but convincing recreation of the intimate diary of a young Anglo-Irish woman called Cleone Knox, purportedly written during her travels around various European countries in the mid-eighteenth century. The prefatory material to the diaries claimed that they had beendiscovered and edited by Knox’s descendent, the equally fictional Mr Alexander Blacker-Kerr. King-Hall’s publisher, Thornton Butterworth, was responsible for the book’s careful marketing and publicity. King-Hall’s name was not attached to the book, so that it appeared, at first glance at least, to be a genuine diary. It was taken as such by a number of reviewers, including Lord Darling in
The Sunday Times
, who hailed it as an important literary discovery. After these enthusiastic pre-publication reviews appeared in the autumn of 1925, the canny Butterworth postponed its release while more copies were printed, and when it finally went on sale in December it became a bestseller. Experts in eighteenth-century literature quickly questioned its provenance, however, and over the next six months speculation turned to the true authorship of this literary ‘hoax’. On 24 June 1926, a headline on the front page of
The Daily Express
declared it the ‘Cleverest Hoax of the Century’, while the front page of
The New York Times
read: ‘Girl Tricks the World with Literary Hoax, Intended as a Joke’. King-Hall – who had never intended any such deception when she wrote the book, and had relied only on her own general knowledge, and what she could glean from Hove Public Library – found herself propelled into a brief period of literary celebrity.
    King-Hall capitalised in a modest manner upon this small degree of fame, working as a journalist during the next few years, and producing several more novels which did not garner the same degree of attention. In 1929, she married Patrick Perceval Maxwell, actually a distant cousin, who was working for the Sudan Cotton PlantationSyndicate. For