Rita

Born Elizabeth Margaret Jane Humphreys, née Gollan, she was a Scottish writer from Inverness-shire who published under the pseudonym Rita. Her work reached a wide readership, and she is credited with writing around 120 books along with plays and essays.

Beyond her fiction, she is remembered for founding the Writers’ Club for Women, an effort that speaks to her place in the literary world of her time. Her long career stretched across the late Victorian and early 20th-century period, when her novels appeared regularly for readers in Britain and beyond.

Although the name Rita is less familiar today than it once was, her output was extraordinary, and her career shows how successful and visible women writers could be in popular fiction of the era.