Her 1869 novel Misunderstood was enjoyed by Lewis Carroll and George du Maurier, and by Vladimir Nabokov as a child.
Her cousin, Sibyl Montgomery (died 1935), was the first wife of the Marquess of Queensberry and mother of Lord Alfred Douglas.
Florence Montgomery's story-telling abilities were first tried on younger brothers and sisters, but the novelist G. J. Whyte-Melville saw a story of hers printed for a charity bazaar, about a golden-haired girl whose mother dies of scarlet fever, and advised that it should be published.
[1] Writing to Charles L. Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) about that time, du Maurier remarked, "Miss Florence Montgomery is a very charming and sympathetic young lady, the daughter of the admiral of that ilk.
"[1] Charlotte Mitchell, in her entry for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, notes "an undercurrent of animosity against the modern young woman... for example Lady Jane Marton in Tony: a Sketch (1898), a hard, selfish, bicycling creature..."[3] Vladimir Nabokov, on the other hand, recalls in his memoir Speak Memory that Misunderstood was the first English book his mother read to him, and "the fate of its hero Humphrey used to bring a more specialised lump to one's throat than anything in Dickens or Daudet.