[1] Her early novels earned a reputation for sensationalism, so that her later, stronger work tended to be neglected by critics, although she was called a queen of the circulating libraries.

She was a long-time friend of fellow writer Henry James and was noted for her adversarial relationship with both Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde.

Le Fanu also introduced her to the publisher Richard Bentley, who refused her first novel on the grounds of it being improper material, but accepted the second.

After the commercial failure of Alas!, for which she received her highest-ever payment at the height of her career, she decided to write one-volume novels instead.

In a review published in The New York Times of 12 May 1906, a certain K. Clark complained that her latest novel was hard to procure and wondered why such a fine writer was so little appreciated.

Her last, A Fool in Her Folly (1920), was printed posthumously with an introduction by a long-time friend and fellow writer, Marie Belloc Lowndes.

Rhoda Broughton never married, and some critics assume that a disappointed attachment was the impulse that made her try her pen instead of some other literary work like that of Mrs Thackeray Ritchie.

In his article on her Richard C. Tobias calls her "the leading woman novelist in England between the death of George Eliot and the beginning of Virginia Woolf's career".

In A Beginner (1894) Broughton devises a young writer who has her work secretly published and then later torn apart by unknowing people right in front of her face.

The novel questions social conventions in revealing how destructive they can be to quiet people who might have once stepped aside from the proper path.

In a different way the same criticism is being made in Foes in Law (1900), where the main question is which lifestyle is the one productive of the highest degree of happiness: the conventional one or one that accords with private needs.

Or so it seems at first sight, but the reader gets the feeling that Faustina is more interested in getting to know and impress other young women, which can also be interpreted as criticism of the New Woman as a type.

The homoerotic touch reappears in Lavinia (1902), but this time it is a young man who is frequently made to appear unmanly and even utter the wish to have been born a woman.

This culminates in A Waif's Progress (1905), in which Broughton creates a married couple who turn everything traditional upside down, with the wife fulfilling the stereotype of an older, rich husband.

Her fame and success was such that some found it worthwhile to satirise her in works like "Groweth Down Like A Toadstool" or "Gone Wrong" by "Miss Rody Dendron".