[2] Commenting on her literary reputation in 1859, American critic Samuel Austin Allibone said Grey "has fairly earned a title to be ranked as one of the most popular novelists of the day.
In her spare time wrote silver fork novels,[6] such as Sybil Lennard (1846), about a Swiss orphan who rises to become a governess in England; it has been described by John Sutherland as resembling the fiction of the Brontë sisters.
[6] Grey's ability to write both "proper" fiction for polite society, and sensational Gothic and penny dreadfuls (some of which were initially published anonymously), earned her a broad audience in her day.
[2] The penny dreadfuls were published by Edward Lloyd, "It is hard to imagine that Elizabeth Caroline Grey, popular author of a large number of 3 volume silver fork novels, could have moonlighted as a penny-a-liner.
[7] Indeed, Spedding says the traditional life story of Grey, which can be ultimately sourced back to Andrew De Ternant's version, and later replicated in respectable encyclopaedias such as John Sutherland's Companion to Victorian Fiction, is a total fabrication.