author
Ida Reade Allen
Best known today through surviving dime novels and cheap-fiction reprints, this elusive writer specialized in fast-moving romance and melodrama aimed at popular readers. Her stories, including Too Quickly Judged and The Breath of Slander, reflect the emotional turns and moral stakes that made women’s dime fiction so widely read.
2 Audiobooks
The breath of slander : or, Virtue triumphs
by Ida Reade Allen
Heart to heart : or, A race for love
by Ida Reade Allen
About the author
Ida Reade Allen appears to have been a writer of American popular fiction whose work circulated in the dime novel and story-paper world. Reliable modern reference pages for women’s dime fiction list her among the authors active in that tradition, and bibliographic records connect her name with titles such as At Another's Bidding, A Blue Grass Heroine, Heart to Heart; or, A Race for Love, and The Breath of Slander; or, Virtue Triumphs.
What survives most clearly is the work itself rather than a detailed personal history. Project Gutenberg currently offers digital editions of Heart to Heart and The Breath of Slander, and bookseller and library-style listings suggest that a number of her romance and domestic melodrama titles remained in circulation long after their original publication.
Because confirmed biographical information is scarce, it is safest to remember her as one of the many now-obscure authors who helped shape popular reading for women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even with so little known about her life, the record of her titles shows a writer who understood suspense, sentiment, and the strong pull of serialized storytelling.