Pearl Mary Teresa Craigie (November 3, 1867 – August 13, 1906) was an Anglo-American novelist and dramatist who wrote under the pen-name of John Oliver Hobbes.
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Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she was the eldest daughter of the businessman John Morgan Richards and his wife Laura Hortense (née Arnold). The family moved to London soon after her birth, and she was educated in London and Paris. When she was nineteen she married Reginald Walpole Craigie, by whom she had one son, John Churchill Craigie: but the marriage proved an unhappy one, and was dissolved on her petition in July 1895. She was brought up as a Nonconformist, but in 1892 was received into the Roman Catholic Church, of which she remained a devout and serious member.
From 1900, Mrs Craigie lived and worked at her villa near her parents' home at Steephill, Isle of Wight. The villa is now called Craigie Lodge and bears a small commemorative plaque of Mrs Craigie's time there. In 1906 she died suddenly of heart failure in London en route to a holiday in Scotland.[1]
Her first little book, the epigrammatic Some Emotions and a Moral, was published in 1891 in Mr Fisher Unwin's Pseudonym Library, and was followed by The Sinners Comedy (1892), A Study in Temptations (1893), A Bundle of Life (1894), The Gods, Some Mortals, and Lord Wickenham. The Herb Moon (1896), a country love story, was followed by The School for Saints (1897), with a sequel, Robert Orange (1900).
Mrs Craigie had already written a one-act proverb, Journeys end in Lovers Meeting, produced by Ellen Terry in 1894, and a three-act tragedy, Osbern and Ursyne, printed in the Anglo-Saxon Review (1899), when her successful piece, The Ambassador, was produced at the St James's Theatre in 1898. A Repentance (one act, 1899) and The Wisdom of the Wise (1900) were produced at the same theatre, and The Flute of Pan (1904) first at Manchester and then at the Shaftesbury Theatre; she was also part author of The Bishop's Move (Garrick Theatre, 1902).
Later books are The Serious Wooing (1901), Love and the Soul Hunters (1902), Tales about Temperament (1902), The Vineyard (1904).