The work of Lucy Lane Clifford focuses on the desire of men and women to find happiness through relationships and on the courage required to cope with whatever reality follows from such aspirations. In the last four decades of her life, Clifford achieved recognition writing about these issues in popular stories, novels, and plays. Before this time her personal life dominated her activities, and until 1879 she had only the renown that comes through association with distinguished people. After her death her name appeared mostly in the biographies and letters of some of the most eminent writers of the time, and her work virtually disappeared into the oblivion assigned until recently to much of the domestic fiction and drama published at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Before her first publications--children's stories--were produced in the 1880s, Clifford found herself in the world of...