The novels of Mrs. Henry Wood were the quintessential Victorian best-sellers. Danesbury House (1860) penetrated an evangelical market normally closed to novels, and its Scottish sales exceeded those of any earlier novel. Within a year, metropolitan readers were besieging bookstores for East Lynne (1861), while printers worked day and night to produce four editions in six months. During an expedition to the Holy Land, the Prince of Wales played truant for a day to read this tale of desertion, adultery, and divorce, then handed it to Prof. (later Dean) A. P. Stanley, who read it in three hours, after which he and the prince cross-examined each other about it over dinner. For some years Mrs. Wood rivaled Dickens in being able to dictate her terms to her publishers. A born storyteller, Mrs. Wood incarnated the Victorian middle class's evangelical Christianity and its concern with domestic happiness and commercial probity.

Ellen...