Cynthia Stockley

Born Lilian Julian Webb in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State on July 7, 1873, she later wrote under the name Cynthia Stockley. She became a South African-Rhodesian novelist, journalist, and actress, and was especially known for popular romance fiction set in Rhodesia and South Africa.

After spending time in southern Africa, she went to London and worked on the stage before turning to fiction. Her novels and stories found a large audience in the early 1900s, with settings that drew on colonial life, travel, and frontier society.

Stockley died in London on January 15, 1936. Though some older sources disagree on details such as her birth year, reliable modern references consistently place her life from 1873 to 1936, and that is how she is most commonly identified today.