Harriet Lewis

Harriet Lewis was an American popular novelist born Harriet Newell O'Brien in Penn Yan, New York, in 1841. She wrote under Harriet Lewis and related forms of her name, and her work appeared in the booming world of 19th-century story papers and inexpensive fiction series. Project Gutenberg and other catalog records link her with surviving novels including Neva's Choice, Neva's Three Lovers, and Tresillian Court.

She is especially associated with the romance and sensation fiction that ran in papers such as the New York Ledger, and reference sources describe her as an important figure in dime-novel and serial fiction. Some sources also note that she collaborated with her husband, the writer Leon Lewis, though she also published extensively in her own right.

Lewis died in 1878 at a relatively young age. Even so, her fiction remained in circulation afterward through later book editions, a sign of how strongly her melodramatic, serialized storytelling connected with readers of her time.