Florence Marryat

Her works include Love’s Conflict (1865), Her Father's Name (1876), There is No Death (1891) and The Spirit World (1894), The Dead Man's Message (1894) and The Blood of the Vampire (1897).

[2] Marryat wrote her first novel, Love’s Conflict (1865), while her young children were suffering from scarlet fever, to distract herself from "sad thoughts".

Other early works included Woman Against Woman (1866), The Confessions of Gerald Escourt (1867), Nelly Brooke (1868), Veronique (1868) and The Girls of Feversham (1869), mining the British public's taste for sensational fiction: "lurid stories of seduction, murder, insanity, extramarital sex, incest, and the exploits of the demi-monde".

[1][4] By the mid-1870s Marryat was an internationally successful author and was living together with her future husband, Colonel Francis Lean of the Royal Marine Light Infantry.

[4] At the age of 48, in 1881, Marryat returned to the stage, playing the role of Hephzibah Horton in a drama she wrote based on her novel Her World Against a Lie.

In 1884 she played Queen Altemire in a revival of W. S. Gilbert's fairy comedy The Palace of Truth in London with Herbert Beerbohm Tree.

[4] In 1886, Marryat wrote a lighthearted book about her travels in the United States called Tom Tiddler's Ground.

[2] The public found Marryat's work accessible, and reviewers admitted the effectiveness of her "graphic, nervous, vital" style, but critics called her "cynical and 'third-rate', too dependent for her plots on 'the stock in trade of fourth-rate solicitors'".