Ada Leverson, who published her series of six novels during and soon after the Edwardian period, had virtually no competition from other women writers of the time. Her style of fiction was different from that of such contemporaries as Elizabeth von Arnim, Elinor Glyn, May Sinclair, Edith Wharton, or Willa Cather. Katherine Mansfield, who had come to London from New Zealand, published nothing before 1911, while slightly later came the deeply romantic, even sentimental fiction of Ethel M. Dell. It has to be said that Ada Leverson's fiction appeals particularly to women, although several male literary critics, including V. S. Pritchett, C. P. Snow, Anthony Powell, and Vernon Scannell, have given it the praise it deserves, especially during the last generation.

Ada Esther Leverson was born on 10 October 1862 into the world portrayed in her novels, that of fashionable London society at the close of the Victorian era. Her father...