Anna H. (Anna Harriet) Drury

Born in Harrow, Middlesex, in 1824, she came from a family closely connected with Harrow School: both her father, the Rev. William James Joseph Drury, and her grandfather had taught there. She later spent time in Brussels, where her father served as chaplain to King Leopold I of Belgium, and she was said to have known Greek and some Hebrew from an early age.

She built a long literary career as an English novelist and poet. Her books included Friends and Fortune (1849), Light and Shade (1853), Misrepresentation (1859), The Story of a Shower (1872), and later works such as Called to the Rescue and In the Enemy's Country. Some of her writing was aimed at boys, and she is also remembered as a 19th-century children's author.

She was a friend of Anthony Trollope and later lived in Torquay, where she became close to the novelist Frances Mary Peard. She never married, and died in 1912 near Newton Abbot in Devon. Modern reference works remember her as a Victorian writer whose fiction could be traditional in form while still making room for perceptive observations about women’s place in family life.