Her best-selling novel The Vicar of Langthwaite was admired by William Ewart Gladstone, who wrote the foreword.

Martha Louisa "Lily" Watson was born on 11 Oct 1849 in Taunton, Somerset.

Her father was a Baptist minister Samuel Gosnell Green (1822–1905) who subsequently moved to teach classics and mathematics at the Horton Baptist Academy[2] Watson's father joined the Religious Tract Society in 1876, and she wrote a number of works of fiction for them.

Interest in her was revived[failed verification] when novelist Kate Mosse found that Watson was her great-grandmother, which inspired her to write her 2022 book Warrior Queens & Quiet Revolutionaries.

[2] Her works include:[4] Within Sight of the Snow and A Child of Genius were also serialised in The Girl's Own Paper,[3] a periodical to which she made over 90 contributions[5]