Florence Henniker

Florence Henniker (1855 –1923 ) was a British novelist.

Life

She was born Florence Ellen Hungerford Milnes, in 1855, the daughter of Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Lord Houghton. She married a British army officer, Arthur Henry Henniker-Major (1855-1912) in 1882. Her first novel, Sir George was published in 1891.

In May 1893, while hosting a party at Dublin Castle, her brother's residence as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, she met Thomas Hardy whom her father had known since 1880. She would remain friends with Hardy for the rest of her life, although she rejected his sexual advances. They collaborated on a short story "The Spectre of the Real", first published in 1894. Hardy's letters to Henniker were published in 1972 under the title One Rare Fair Woman.

In 1898 the Spectator described her novel Sowing the Sand as a book "conform[ing] generally to the type long ago established by Ouida, which in our young days used to be accounted improper, but is now food for babes." Reviewing her collection of short stories Contrasts in 1903, the same magazine said its contents showed "much insight into character, and an almost inhuman power of devising heartrending situations in everyday life."

Works

• Sir George (1891)
• Bid Me Good-bye (1892)
• Foiled (1893)
• Outlines [short stories] (1894)
• In Scarlet and Grey [short stories] with The Spectre of the Real by Thomas Hardy and Florence Henniker (1896)
• Sowing the Sand (1898)
• Contrasts [short stories] (1903)
• Our Fatal Shadows (1907)
• Second Fiddle (1912)

Her play The Courage of Silence was produced in 1905. She edited Arthur Henniker: A Little Book for his Friends (1912), which included an uncollected poem by Thomas Hardy: "A.H., 1855-1912".