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. In 1894 she married the publisher A.C (Arthur Charles) Fifield.

Growing up at Terras, Hocking was surrounded by the china clay mining and tin mining industries, the latter appears regularly in her work. Her father turned to farming because of a decline in the mining industry and, one day in her teens, while helping out pitching corn sheaves, she seriously injured her spine. Her shoulder and hip where twisted in opposite directions resulting in a double curvature. Hocking did not seek treatment at the time, hiding the injury under her long hair. She never told her family about the accident that was the reason for her 'bad back.' Attempts at treatment in later life were not successful and she was often in pain.

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).

She taught at the village school in nearby Coombe, was involved with the United Methodist church at St Stephen-in-Brannel as an organist and choir leader, and also sang contralto in a chapel quartet which travelled around Cornwall.

Hocking lived at Terras until her mother's death in 1891. For the following three years she lived alternately with her brother Joseph at Thornton Heath, Surrey and her brother Silas at Southport. She published only A Conquered Self during this time, and that under the pseudonym of S. Moore-Carew (the name taken from an ancestor on her mother's side of the family).

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 1903 Hocking published Some Old Cornish Folk (under her maiden name of Salome Hocking rather than the previous pseudonym or her married name). The book is a portrait of various characters and local stories from her parish of St Stephen-in-Brannel.

...
Wikipedia