Munro and his siblings led slightly insular lives during their early years and were educated by governesses. It is said that his aunts were most likely models for some of his characters, notably the aunt in "The Lumber Room" and the guardian in "Sredni Vashtar": Munro's sister Ethel said that the aunt in "The Lumber Room" was an almost perfect portrait of Aunt Augusta. The children were sent to Broadgate Villa, in Pilton near Barnstaple, North Devon, to be raised by their grandmother and paternal maiden aunts, Charlotte and Augusta, in a strict and puritanical household. Īfter his wife's death Charles Munro sent his three children, Ethel Mary (born April 1868), Charles Arthur (born July 1869) and two-year-old Hector, home to England. In 1872, on a home visit to England, Mary Munro was charged by a cow, and the shock caused her to miscarry. Her nephew Cecil William Mercer became a novelist under the name Dornford Yates. Saki was the son of Charles Augustus Munro, an Inspector General for the Indian Imperial Police, and his wife, Mary Frances Mercer (1843–1872), the daughter of Rear Admiral Samuel Mercer. Hector Hugh Munro was born in Akyab (now Sittwe), British Burma, which was then part of British India. īesides his short stories (which were first published in newspapers, as was customary at the time, and then collected into several volumes), he wrote a full-length play, The Watched Pot, in collaboration with Charles Maude two one-act plays a historical study, The Rise of the Russian Empire (the only book published under his own name) a short novel, The Unbearable Bassington the episodic The Westminster Alice (a parliamentary parody of Alice in Wonderland) and When William Came, subtitled A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns, a fantasy about a future German invasion and occupation of Britain. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, he himself influenced A. He is considered by English teachers and scholars as a master of the short story, and often compared to O.
Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirize Edwardian society and culture. Hector Hugh Munro (18 December 1870 – 14 November 1916), better known by the pen name Saki and also frequently as H.