Marian Andrews (née Hare, 1839 – 1929) was a biographer and novelist who published under the pseudonym Christopher Hare. She wrote stories set in rural Wiltshire, followed by historical fiction and biographies of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century figures, especially women, complaining that "all serious consideration was reserved for the men of the period" among other historians.
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Life
Marian was born Mary Ann Hare in Brompton, London, on 24 February 1839, the eldest child of lawyer Thomas Hare and his wife Mary, née Samson. Her three sisters were the artist Alice Westlake, Katherine Clayton and Lydia Mary Clayton (the latter two married a pair of Clayton brothers). Along with Marian, Alice and Katherine were signatories of the 1866 petition for women's suffrage. Alice and Katherine served on the central committee of the National Society for Women's Suffrage, and Katherine campaigned for girls’ education and raised funds for a memorial to Katherine of Aragon. Their four brothers were Sherlock, Herbert, Albert, and Lancelot Hare, lieutenant-governor of Bengal.
The family settled in Surrey, where Marian and her sisters were educated at home. On 26 November 1861, she married Rev. William Ryton Andrews, a clergyman and amateur geologist. His work took them to Sussex, to Middlesex, and from 1873 to 1892 to Teffont Evias, Wiltshire, where her first stories were set. Her fictional village setting is modeled on her husband's parish, and shows a sympathetic understanding of his parishioner's lives including the interiors of cottages, folk customs, and the local workhouse.