Clotilde Graves

Who was Clotilde Graves?

Clotilde Augusta Inez Mary Graves, was an Irish author who wrote under the pseudonym of Richard Dehan, and a successful playwright in London and New York City.

Known as Clo Graves, she was born 3 June 1863 at Buttevant Castle, Co. Cork, third daughter of Major William Henry Graves of the 18th Royal Irish Regiment and Antoinette, daughter of Captain George Anthony Deane of Harwich. She was a second cousin of Alfred Perceval Graves – son of Rt. Rev. Charles Graves, the mathematician Anglican Bishop of Limerick, Ardfert and Ahadoe- father of the poet Robert Graves, and his brother Charles Patrick Graves.

At the age of nine, she moved with her family to England from their Irish home. She had seen a good deal of barrack life, and at Alvington Lodge, Granada Street, Southsea, where they went to live, she acquired a large knowledge of both services in the circle of naval and military friends they made there, and this knowledge years afterward she turned to good account in her novel Between Two Thieves.

Educated at a Convent in Lourdes, she converted to Catholicism and came to London where she studied art at Bloomsbury.