Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

Born in Wolverhampton in 1860, she grew up in a prominent political family: her father was Henry Hartley Fowler, later 1st Viscount Wolverhampton. Educated mainly at home, she began writing early, and her younger sister Edith Henrietta Fowler also became a novelist.

She went on to build a successful literary career as a writer of popular romances, while also publishing poetry and books for children. Sources consistently describe her as a committed Methodist, and that religious outlook shaped the tone and concerns of much of her work.

In 1903 she married Alfred Laurence Felkin. She died in 1929, but her fiction remains a window into the tastes, beliefs, and domestic tensions of turn-of-the-century British popular reading.