Charlotte Riddell was best known among her contemporaries as a novelist of the City, the financial center of London. As a short-story writer she was less well known, though she published seven collections. However, her recent reputation rests upon her abilities in this genre, in particular upon her talents as a writer of ghost stories; according to bibliographer and critic E. F. Bleiler she was "preeminent" among female authors of such stories in the Victorian period.

Charlotte Elizabeth Lawson Cowan was born on 30 September 1832 in Carrickfergus, a small town near Belfast, to an Irish father, James Cowan, high sheriff for County Antrim, and an English mother, Ellen Kilshaw. Bleiler describes her mother as a "beautiful, graceful, and accomplished English woman." Her father Bleiler calls in his introduction to The Collected Ghost Stories of Mrs. J. H. Riddell (1977) a "shadowy" figure; Riddell told Helen Black, "I never knew him...