Author: William Delisle Hay
Author: William Delisle Hay (born 1853)
Biography: William Delisle Hay was born in 1853 in Bishopwearmouth, County Durham, the son of William Hay (d. 1866) of Ford Hall and Julia Ithiel Allport. His younger brother was the Rev. Reynell Wreford Hay (1859–1937). As a young man, he lived for a time in New Zealand. On his return to the London in the early 1880s, he wrote two novels of the future, The Doom of the Great City (1880) and Three Hundred Years Hence (1881), and a book on New Zealand. Hay was a fellow of the Royal Geograpical Society and a mycologist (he wrote two books on British fungi). His last novel, Blood: A Tragic Tale (1888), involves a blood transfusion leading to swapped identities. He was living in 1896.
References: Alumni Cantabrigienses (Reynell Wreford Hay); British Census (1861, 1871, 1891); Gentleman's Magazine (September 1851, April 1866)
Fiction Titles:
- The Doom of the Great City: Being the Narrative of a Survivor, Written A.D. 1942. 1 vol. London: Newman and Co., 1880.
- Three Hundred Years Hence: or, A Voice from Posterity. 1 vol. London: Newman and Co., 1881.
- Blood: A Tragic Tale. 1 vol. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1888.