Flora Macdonald Mayor has been compared as a novelist to Jane Austen because of her provincial settings and the uneventful lives of her characters but chiefly because of the obvious influence of Austen on her language and invention. Their true kinship lies in Mayor's capacity for acute observation of subtleties of personality, and in her ability to satirize character without reducing it. Like Austen; her scope and her output were small, but what she did was, for the most part, masterly. Mayor's work, however, has a different kind of complexity because of her willingness to delve into her subjects' emotional lives and because of her depiction of turn-of-the-century social changes and their disturbance of private and social relationships.

Mayor was one of twin daughters born 20 October 1872, at Montpelier Row, Twickenham. Her father, Joseph Bickersteth Mayor, was a clergyman and emeritus professor of classics at King's College, London, and...