Salome Hocking

Salome Hocking Fifield (née Hocking; April 1859 – April 1927) was a Cornish novelist. She was born at Terras, St Stephen-in-Brannel, Cornwall, to James Hocking, a mine agent, and his wife Elizabeth (née Kitto). She was one of seven siblings, all of whom were given biblical names. Her brothers, Silas Kitto Hocking and Joseph Hocking, were also novelists, as well as being Methodist ministers.

Hocking took up writing (her brothers were already authors), after the premature death of her father. She produced stories set in the familiar Cornish environments of mining, farming and seafaring. During the 1880s she produced five novels in quick succession - Granny's Hero (1885); The Fortunes of Riverside or Waiting and Winning (1885); Norah Lang (1886); Jacky (1887) and Chronicles of a Quiet Family (1888).

Marriage and later life It was while living with one of her brothers that she met Arthur Charles Fifield, a publisher. They were married on Christmas Eve 1894.

In 1909 the couple moved to a small house on the Smitham Downs at Coulsdon in Surrey which Hocking chose to name Trenowth Cottage after the woods near to her family home in Cornwall.

During the First World War she was a member of the Coulsdon Women War-Work Party, spending much of her time knitting items such as mufflers and bedsocks for the men at the front.

Final years Declining health connected to her back injury made it increasingly harder for her to write. She often lacked energy and suffered from almost constant headaches. According to her husband she had completed a first typed draft of a Cornish novel called Pensweeta but was not well enough to ready it for publication. In the final seven or eight years of her life her disabilities were the reason for an almost complete withdrawal from social life. She died at home at Trenowth Cottage on 10 April 1927 aged 68.

Complete works Granny's Hero: A Tale of Country Life (1885) The Fortunes of Riverside or Waiting and Winning (1885) Norah Lang: The Mine Girl (1886) Jacky: A Story of Everyday Life (1887) Chronicles of a Quiet Family: A Temperance Story (1888) A Conquered Self (1894) - published under the pseudonym S. Moore Carew Some Old Cornish Folk (1903) Belinda the Backward: A Romance of Modern Idealism (1905) Beginnings (no date)