Clotilde Graves

Clotilde Augusta Inez Mary Graves (1863– 3 December 1932), was an Irish authoress who wrote under the pseudonym of Richard Dehan, and a successful playwright in London and New York.

Known as Clo Graves, she was born 3 June 1863 at Buttevant Castle, Co. Cork, daughter of Major William Henry Graves (1825–1892) and Antoinette Deane, daughter of Captain George Deane of Harwich. She was a cousin of Alfred Perceval Graves, the father of the poet Robert Graves, and his brother Charles Patrick Graves.

Educated at a Convent in Lourdes, she converted to Catholicism and came to London where she studied art at Bloomsbury. She was an unusual figure in London society, wearing her hair short, affecting a masculine manner and cut of costume, and smoking cigarettes in public when such characteristics were considered eccentric.

Embarking on a literary career, Edmund Yates thought her stories ideal for his magazine World, and she also contributed to Punch. She became a successful London and New York playwright who enjoyed considerable literary acclaim in the first decades of the 20th century. With the actress Gertrude Kingston she wrote the play A Matchmaker, which gained a certain notoriety when it was criticized for comparing marriage to prostitution. In 1911, under the pseudonym of Richard Dehan, she published The Dop Doctor. It was made into a film in 1915 by Fred Paul. The film gave considerable offence in South Africa due to the harsh portrayal of English and Dutch characters. It was eventually banned under the Defence of the Realm Act. The story hinges around a drunken and disgraced medic who eventually makes his way to South Africa where he redeems his honour at the Siege of Mafeking. Albert Gérard, in his European-language writing in Sub Saharan Africa ISBN 9630538326, regards the book's description of the siege of Mafeking "as a heroic justification of British Imperial strategy and the vindication of a belief in the righteousness and superiority of the British cause. The Dop Doctor contains pro-Jingo arguments of the type which offers the stereotypical portrait of the Boer as backward and despicably primitive, and the black man as a shadow figure behind the civilizing foreground, an appendage of an argument over what to do with his labour". Between Two Thieves and One Braver Thing followed in 1914.

She died at Hatch End, Middlesex, on 3 December 1932.

External links

• Works by Richard Dehan at Project Gutenberg
• Clotilde Graves at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database