Marie Connor Leighton

Born Marie Connor and later known as Marie Connor Leighton, she was a British novelist associated with late Victorian and Edwardian popular fiction. Sources agree that she died on January 28, 1941, and describe her as a notably prolific writer of serial stories and melodramatic novels.

She began publishing very young: reference sources list her first novel, Beauty's Queen, in 1884, when she was still in her teens. She later married the writer Robert Leighton, and the two collaborated on Convict 99, the work most often singled out in modern summaries of her career.

What stands out most about her now is the sheer scale and energy of her output. She wrote for a broad reading public and helped shape the kind of emotional, fast-moving popular fiction that thrived in newspapers, magazines, and lending libraries of her time.