Mrs. (Elizabeth Caroline) Grey

Elizabeth Caroline Grey, often published as Mrs. Grey or Mrs. Colonel Grey, was an English novelist active from the 1820s into the 1860s. She was credited with more than 30 works across romance, silver-fork fiction, Gothic fiction, and sensation writing, and contemporary readers seem to have known her well enough that one 19th-century critic called her one of the popular novelists of the day.

She is now most often linked with The Skeleton Count, or The Vampire Mistress (1828), an early vampire story by a woman writer. Her fiction also included society novels such as De Lisle and later works like Sybil Lennard, showing a range from fashionable drawing-room drama to darker, more melodramatic material.

At the same time, her life and bibliography are unusually tangled. Later research has shown that several different "Mrs. Greys" were confused with one another, so some long-repeated details about her biography and some books once assigned to her are not fully certain. That uncertainty has made her an even more interesting figure for readers of Victorian and Gothic literature.