A true woman of letters, Naomi Royde-Smith enjoyed a fifty-five-year career as a novelist, journalist, editor, translator, playwright, and biographer. Although her books are little read today, she was an important popular novelist and literary influence in England in the period between the world wars.

Naomi Gwladys Smith was born in Llanwrst, Wales, in 1875, the eldest daughter of Ann Daisy Williams Smith and Michael Holroyd Smith; the surname Royde-Smith, a variation on her father's middle and last names, seems to have been her own invention. Her childhood was spent in Halifax, Yorkshire; she would draw on the people and events of those years for several of her novels, including the heavily autobiographical Children in the Wood (1928). After her family moved to London, Royde-Smith was educated at Clapham High School and at a private school in Geneva.

Royde-Smith's career as a writer began in 1905 with a children's version of...