In her own day, Lucy Clifford was a respected novelist and playwright whose works were translated into foreign languages and published in both legitimate and pirated editions outside England. Her first book was a collection of poems and stories for children titled Children Busy, Children Glad, Children Naughty, Children Sad (1881) and inscribed, "stories by L. C." It sold thirty-one thousand copies and was attributed by some to Lewis Carroll. Although her most commercially successful works were her adult novels Mrs. Keith's Crime: A Record (1885), Love-Letters of a Worldly Woman (1891), and Aunt Anne (1892), Clifford is primarily remembered for her friendships with such influential literary figures as Henry James, Rudyard Kipling, George Eliot, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Leslie Stephen, and Violet Hunt, and her children's book Anyhow Stories, Moral and Otherwise (1882). This book, particularly the story "The New Mother" , firmly established Clifford's reputation as a children's author.

Clifford...