English novelist and brother of Charles Kingsley (Kingsley, Charles). Henry is best known for Ravenshoe (1861), in which the hero fights in the Crimean War.

After leaving Oxford University, he set out for the Australian goldfields but was unsuccessful and returned to England after five years to write the novel The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn (1859), set in Australia. He covered the Franco-German War of 1870–71 as a war correspondent. His numerous novels are lively, but his later works became increasingly chattery and shapeless.