Sir Francis Grant P.R.A. 1803-1878

This attractive pair of portraits depicts the young Mr Henry Sydenham Singleton of Meli, a handsome and wealthy Irish landowner and his very beautiful wife Mary, a famous novelist, whom he married in 1864. Mary Montgomerie Lamb was born of aristocratic parentage at Beauport Littlehampton in Sussex, on 24 February 1843, the eldest daughter of Charles James Saville Montgomerie Lamb and his wife Anna Charlotte Grey. Mary's grandfather was Sir Charles Montolieu Lamb, the second baronet, of Beauport in Sussex. From her earliest years she had shown a precocious talent for writing, penning poetry and short stories with enthusiasm and talent. However as was so often the case, her family disapproved of her endeavours and as her writing became more and more serious to her, so did her need for a pseudonym. She chose the penname 'Violet Fane' the name oa a character in Disraeli's Vivian Grey and it is under this name that her work was published . Mary, or 'Violet', was already well established as a writer when she married Henry Singleton at the age of twenty-one and the couple became very well known in fashionable London society. Mrs Singleton was particularly known for her beauty, charm and original coversation. The Singletons had a house in Meli in Ireland and a house in England, at Hazeley in Hampshire where they raised their two sons and two daughters.

Mary Singleton's first publication was a volume of verse entitled From Dawn to Noon (1872). This was followed by Denzil Place: a story in verse (1875), The Queen of the Fairies (1876), and Anthony Badington, a drama in prose and verses (1877). She also wrote prose, beginning with the witty social sketches entitled Edwin and Angelina Papers (1878) and continuing with a number of light essays. Three novels, Sophy, or The Adventures of a Savage (1881), Thro' Love and War (1886) and The Story of Helen Davenant (1889) were followed by further poems, Autumn Songs (1889). In 1892 a second edition of her collected poems was published, now in two volumes, and also in Memoirs of Valois, Queen of Navarre.