Ethel Sidgwick is a novelist frequently compared to Henry James. Her early novels received high praise, and she was viewed as a writer of great potential, but her later novels were seen as passé because of their focus on drawing rooms and country estates.

Sidgwick was born in Rugby on 20 December 1877 to Arthur Sidgwick, a schoolmaster at Rugby School and Charlotte S. Sidgwick. She was educated at Oxford High School; she also studied literature and music privately. She never married, taught in girls' schools in England and France, and lived in Oxford during the last part of her life. She was the niece of Henry Sidgwick, a leading philosopher of ethics and one of the founders of the Society for Psychical Research, and his wife, Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, from 1892 to 1910. Ethel Sidgwick's final book was a memoir of her aunt, published in...