Edward Douglas Fawcett

Edward Douglas Fawcett (11 April 1866 – 14 April 1960) was an English mountaineer, philosopher and novelist. Life Edward Douglas Fawcett was born in Hove, Sussex on 11 April 1866. He was the elder son of Edward Fawcett, an equerry to the Prince of Wales (King Edward VII) and the older brother of explorer Percy Fawcett. He was educated at Newton Abbot College in Devon and was a Queen's Scholar at Westminster School from 1880. Fawcett converted to Buddhism, having taken the pansil (the lay follower vow to the Five Precepts) while with Henry Steel Olcott in Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) in January 1890. He was an associate of Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky, leading theoretician of the esoteric religious movement Theosophy. He assisted her in her writing and in compiling quotations from scientific works for The Secret Doctrine and particularly the parts of second volume on the topic of evolutionary hypotheses. Fawcett joined the editorial staff of The Theosophist, the monthly journal of the Theosophical Society and wrote correspondence for the magazine Lucifer. As a science fiction author, Fawcett published his first fantasy novel Hartmann the Anarchist in 1893. He published two adventure novels in the 1890s. His 1894 novel Swallowed by an Earthquake drew favourable comparisons in London to the works of Jules Verne.