British · 1855–1920
Howard Overing Sturgis (1855-1920) was an English novelist, born in London to a wealthy American banking family and educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. He lived most of his adult life at Queen’s Acre in Windsor, where he kept an open house for a circle that included Henry James, Edith Wharton and A. C. Benson. He published three novels. The first two, Tim (1891) and All That Was Possible (1895), were quiet successes; the third, Belchamber (1904), was a study of an unworldly marquess trapped in a loveless marriage, and its cool treatment of weakness and sexual failure unsettled reviewers. James’s disapproval wounded him badly and he wrote no more fiction. Belchamber was rediscovered in the late twentieth century and is now read as an unusually frank Edwardian novel of thwarted masculinity.