Mary L. Pendered

Mary Lucy Pendered (1858 – 19 December 1940) was an English novelist with a career spanning over fifty years. Despite attaining some popularity in her day, she has subsequently fallen into obscurity.

Biography Born in Peckham, Mary Lucy Pendered was the daughter of Thomas Pendered, an auctioneer, and Elizabeth (née Hill). She spent much of her life living in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire.

In 1892 she moved to London to become a journalist working for Life magazine and later the London edition of the Detroit Free Press. After this she spent three or four months in Scotland reporting for the Oban Times. It was here that she worked with Alice Stronach writing four or five columns a night. In addition, she contributed many short stories to periodicals, writing several pieces for the British Musician and Musical News and the Musical Times. She also wrote letters to the newspapers on topics such as women’s suffrage and pacifism.

During the early years of the First World War, Mary lived at Herne Bay, where she was President of the Herne Bay Society for Women’s Suffrage. She was an accomplished pianist and ran a social club for soldiers, offering tea, biscuits, bagatelle and billiards.

On her return to Northamptonshire in 1917, she was elected President of the Wellingborough Branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.

In the 1920s she was an influence on H.E. Bates who was working as a journalist on the Kettering Reminder.

Mary Lucy Pendered died on 19 December 1940 at Beechwood, Overstone Park after a short illness. She was cremated and her ashes were scattered at Kettering.

Work Pendered has been described as a writer of ‘coy pastoral tales’. She produced 29 novels and plays.