Robert Cleland

Robert Cleland is a hard-to-trace novelist associated with Victorian fiction. A reliable literary database notes that the author's birth and death dates are unknown and that the writer "cannot be traced," which makes the surviving novels especially important as the clearest record of the author's work.

The novels credited to Cleland include Inchbracken (1883), A Rich Man's Relatives (1885), True to a Type (1887), Barbara Allan, the Provost's Daughter (1889), and Too Apt a Pupil (1891). The titles suggest a strong interest in domestic drama, character, and social relationships, all familiar pleasures of Victorian popular fiction.

Several of these works have been preserved by Project Gutenberg, which has helped keep Cleland's writing available to modern readers. Even without a well-documented life story, the novels themselves give this obscure author a lasting place among rediscovered 19th-century storytellers.