L. T. Meade was the most prolific writer of girls' books in the nineteenth century. She established the girls' school story with A World of Girls (1886), but only 30 of the approximately 280 books she authored during her forty-year writing career are school stories. Meade wrote in a wide variety of other genres for both juvenile and adult audiences, including "street arab" tales, historical adventure stories, fantasies, domestic stories, robinsonnades (island survival tales, a genre established by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, 1719), nursing stories, detective tales, medical mystery novels, and crime stories. Between 1887 and 1893 she also edited the girls' magazine Atalanta.

Elizabeth Thomasina Meade was born in Bandon, County Cork, Ireland, on 5 June 1844, the daughter of the Reverend Richard Thomas Meade. Her recollections of childhood are of summer afternoons spent with her six siblings in the large garden of their country home at Nohoval. Educated at home by a governess, Meade...