One of the first female professional writers in Russia, Ekaterina Oskarovna Dubrovina is significant both for the extent of her creative output and for the popularity she enjoyed with the reading public during the last decades of the nineteenth century. An incomplete listing of her works in 1900 showed that Dubrovina already had produced more than forty novels as well as equivalent numbers of novellas and short stories. Published in a variety of journals and newspapers, her tales feature characters ranging from coldhearted, shallow society maidens to oppressed and poverty-stricken women "of the people." In addition to treating contemporary themes, particularly those involving women, Dubrovina also wrote historical novels; among her chosen topics were Ivan the Terrible's Russia and the reign of Czar Alexander I.

Dubrovina was born Ekaterina Oskarovna Deikhman on 29 May 1846 in Irkutsk, Siberia, and grew up on the eastern side of Lake Baikal at the Petrovsk...