Maurice Henry Hewlett

Maurice Henry Hewlett (January 22, 1861 -) was an English poet and novelist.

Life
He was born on the 22nd of January 1861, the eldest son of Henry Gay Hewlett, of Shaw Hall, Addington, Kent. He was educated at the London International College, Spring Grove, Isleworth, and was called to the bar in 1891. From 1896 to 1900 he was keeper of the land revenue records and enrolments.

He published in 1895 two books on Italy, Earthwork out of Tuscany, and (in verse) The Masque of Dead Florentines. Songs and Meditations followed in 1897, and in 1898 he won an immediate reputation by his Forest Lovers, a romance of medieval England, full of rapid movement and passion. In the same year he printed the pastoral and pagan drama of Pan and the Young Shepherd, shortened for purposes of representation and produced at the Court Theatre in March 1905, when it was followed by the Youngest of the Angels, dramatized from a chapter in his Fool Errant.

In Little Novels of Italy (1899), a collection of brilliant short stories, he showed again his power of literary expression together with a close knowledge of medieval Italy. The new and vivid portraits of Richard Coeur de Lion in his Richard Yea-and-Nay (1900), and of Mary, queen of Scots, in The Queen's Quair  (1904) showed the combination of fiction with real history at its best. The New Canterbury Tales (1901) was another volume of stories of English life, but he returned to Italian subjects with The Road in Tuscany (1904); in Fond Adventures, Tales of the Youth of the World (1905), two are Italian tales, and The Fool Errant (1905) purports to be the memoirs of Francis Antony Stretley, citizen of Lucca. Later works were the novel The Stooping Lady (1907), and a volume of poems, Artemision  (1909).

Publications

 * Earthwork Out of Tuscany (1895) travel
 * The Masque of Dead Florentines (1895) verse
 * Songs and Meditations (1897)
 * Forest Lovers (1898) historical novel
 * Pan and the Young Shepherd (1898) play
 * Youngest of the Angels (1898) play
 * Little Novels of Italy (1899) short stories
 * Little Novels of English History
 * The Life and Death of Richard Yea-and-Nay (1900) historical novel
 * The New Canterbury Tales (1901)
 * The Queen's Quair or The Six Years' Tragedy (1904) historical novel
 * The Road in Tuscany (1904)
 * Fond Adventures: Tales of the Youth of the World (1905) short stories
 * The Fool Errant (1905) historical novel
 * The Stooping Lady (1907) novel
 * Artemisions (1909) poems
 * Halfway House (1908) novel
 * Open Country (1909) novel
 * Rest Harrow (1910) novel
 * Letters to Sanchia (1910)
 * The Song of Renny (1911)
 * Brazenhead the Great (1911)
 * Bendish (1913) novel
 * For Two Voices (1914) Poem
 * The Little Iliad (1915)
 * The Song of the Plow (1916)
 * The Village Wife’s Lament (1918) poems
 * Thorgils of Treadholt (1917)
 * In Green Shade (1920)
 * The Light Heart (1920)
 * Wiltshire Essays (1921)
 * Extemporary Essays (1922).
 * The Last Essays of Maurice Hewlett (1924)
 * The Letters of Maurice Hewlett (1926) edited by Laurence Binyon

In addition, Hewlett wrote six novels based on the Icelandic Family sagas, of which only The Light Heart and Thorgils of Treadholt are mentioned above. There is also The Outlaw (based on Gisli's Saga), A Lover's Tale (based on Kormak's Saga), Frey and His Wife (Ogmund Dytt's tale), and Gudred the Fair (based on the Greenland sagas).