London, Aug. 29: Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the world’s most celebrated fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, behaved cruelly towards his first-born daughter, a new biography has revealed.

It details how the Scottish-born Victorian author rejected his daughter, Mary, from his first marriage to appease the jealousy of his much younger second wife.

Conan Doyle once denied the teenager permission to return home for Christmas, even though she begged to be allowed to travel back from music school in Germany.

When he died in 1930, he left Mary £2,000 (the equivalent of about £80,000 today). Crucially, however, she was not included in his copyright bequest: all the royalties from his hugely successful books, which would run into millions of pounds over the following decades, went to his second wife and their three children.

The revelations about his hard-hearted behaviour towards his first-born child will shock many fans of his stories and could lead to a re-evaluation of his personality.

Until now, biographies have portrayed Conan Doyle as a man dedicated to duty and selfless family devotion. His three children from his second marriage kept a close watch on what was written about their father and censored material to make certain that he was shown in the best light.

A different picture of the author, however, emerges in Out of the Shadows — The Untold Story of Arthur Conan Doyle’s First Family, written by Georgina Doyle, the widow of one of the writer’s nephews, John. It has been published by Calabash Press in Canada.

Georgina Doyle, 68, drew on previously unpublished letters and diaries and spent 16 years researching and writing the book. “I wanted to set the record straight,” she said last week at her home in Iwerne Minster, Dorset.

“I didn’t set out to denigrate Arthur. I just wanted to set out the facts as I knew them from my husband John and others in the family who knew Arthur’s second wife and what she was like. It was mean of Arthur not to include Mary in the copyright and I believe it was because of Jean. She wanted everything for herself and her children.”

Conan Doyle was already one of Britain’s wealthiest and most famous writers when his first wife, Louise, died in 1906 after a long illness. He had met the woman who was to be his second wife, Jean Leckie, some years earlier but always insisted that the relationship had remained platonic at least until Louise’s death. He married Jean a year later; he was 47 and she 31.

The couple moved from the home in Hindhead, Surrey, where Conan Doyle had lived with Louise, to Crowborough, East Sussex. At this point, however, says Georgina Doyle, the doctor-turned-author became so desperate to keep his new wife happy that he bowed to her possessive jealousy and treated Mary and her brother Kingsley, coldly.