Mary Crawford Fraser (1851-1922)

She was born in Rome, Italy. She was the daughter of the American sculptor Thomas Crawford; sister of the well-known novelist F. Marion Crawford; sister of Baroness von Rabe; half-sister of the author Margaret Terry Chanler, wife of Winthrop Astor Chanler; granddaughter of the New York banker Samuel Ward; and, niece of the social activist Julia Ward Howe and her brother the "King of the Lobby" Sam Ward - first cousins of the self-styled arbiter of New York society, Ward McAllister. She was educated in Italy, New Jersey and on the Isle of Wight in England. In 1874, she married Hugh Fraser whose father was a grandson of the Loyalist Brig.-Gen. Cortlandt Skinner.

Her husband was a British diplomat and she accompanied him to Peking, Vienna, Rome, Santiago, and Tokyo. In Rome in 1884, against the wishes of her mother, she joined her brother and half-sister by converting to Catholicism. In 1889, her husband was posted to Japan as head of the British Legation. He negotiated the treaty that saw Britain and Japan recognized as equal trading partners, but died just a month before it was signed in 1894.

As a widow, Mary found solace in writing and under the name "Mrs. Hugh Fraser" she published some 20-titles including: Palladia (1896); The Looms of Time (1898); The Stolen Emperor (1904); and, The Satanist (1912) that she wrote with her elder son, John, who used the pen-name "J.I. Stahlmann". In 1971, the well-known British writer and editor Peter Haining referred to The Satanist as one of the stories that set the standards for 1960s occult fiction reflected in the works of August Derleth and Dennis Wheatley.