Julia_Constance_Fletcher
Julia Constance Fletcher (1853–1938)[1] was an author and playwright who professionally went by the pseudonym of George Fleming.
She was born in Brazil in 1853,[2][3] the daughter of James Cooley Fletcher (1823-1901) and granddaughter of the banker Calvin Fletcher. Her mother was Henriette Malan, the daughter of a Swiss clergyman.[4] She went to Abbot Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, and was in the class of 1867.[5]
After her parents' divorce, Julia went to live with her mother in Venice. Henriette had remarried, her second husband being a painter, Eugene Benson. Julia also spent some time in London.[4] One of the sponsors of her early novels was Alfred Sassoon, a junior member of the wealthy Sassoon family and the father of Siegfried Sassoon. Alfred's infatuation with Julia was the catalyst for his desertion of his wife, Theresa.[6] Julia's other supporters included her grandfather's friend Henry James, and she also knew Rudyard Kipling, Robert Browning and Walter Pater.[4]
Two of her books, Kismet and Mirage, were published as "no name novels" by Roberts Brothers in Boston.[2] Both books deal with Americans' adventures while traveling abroad, along the Nile and in Syria, respectively. Mirage has been described by Oscar Wilde scholar S. I. Salamensky, as a roman-á-clef fiction in which "a dangerously appealing, if slightly bi- or asexual, figure based on Wilde romantically pursues" a woman who is thought to represent Fletcher.[7]
In 1900 she wrote a translation/adaptation of Edmond Rostand's play Les Romanesques, which she titled The Fantasticks. The 1960 musical of the same name, also based on Les Romanesques, borrows heavily from Fletcher's version.