Emma Marshall was a popular and prolific children's writer in her day, producing nearly two hundred books and assorted short stories and poems during a long career. Although several of her works remained in print into the 1920s, all are now out of print, relegated to the rare-book shelves of the library, while Marshall's name is unknown to both the general reader and most experts on children's literature. The author's descent into obscurity may be because of her chosen genre of religious fiction, which tends to fall below the critical horizon in the twentieth century, or to the fact that she was compelled by financial necessity to overproduce, resulting in a corpus of inconsistent quality. At the height of her career, during the late 1880s and early 1890s, she published from seven to ten volumes each year.

Emma Martin was born on 29 September 1828 in Norwich, the seventh and...