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Robert Smythe Hichens

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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"ROBERT SMYTHE HICHENS (1864-), English novelist, was born at Speldhurst, Kent, Nov. 14 1864. He was educated at Tunbridge Wells and Clifton College, and then became a student at the Royal College of Music, London, with a view to adopting music as a profession. He was, however, diverted to journalism and later to fiction. During his musical period he published some lyrics and short stories, besides a novel, The Coastguard's Secret, at the age of seventeen. But he first attracted serious attention with The Green Carnation (1894) and An Imaginative Man (1895). He followed these by some novels of London society such as The Londoners (1897) and The Woman with the Fan (1904); but his principal work in fiction was a series of novels with an. Eastern setting, beginning with The Garden of Allah (1905) and including The Call of the Blood (1906) and Bella Donna (1909). He also published certain travel sketches in The Holy Land (1910) and The Near East (1913), as well as tales of the supernatural, of which The Dweller on the Threshold (1911) is the best example. Of his dramatized novels Bella Donna, produced at the St. James's theatre, London, in 1911-2, and The Garden of Allah, produced first in New York and (1920) at Drury Lane theatre, London, were the most successful.