Pauline Smith published her first short story in the Scottish Aberdeen Evening Gazette on 15 October 1902, a slight work titled "A Tenantry Dinner." She was twenty years old at the time, and for the next ten years or so she continued to write short pieces and poems with Scottish settings under the pseudonym "Janet Tamson." None of these early works were republished and, in fact, do not indicate exceptional talent on Smith's part. However, the writing she achieved in her forties, although resulting in only a small body of fiction, was extremely well received during her lifetime. For Smith, writing did not come easily. "Everything I did was done slowly and painfully, with many long breaks," she wrote in her essay titled "Why and How I Became an Author," collected in Miscellaneous Writings: Stories, Diaries and Other Unpublished and Out-of-Print Work (1983). After her death in 1959 her reputation declined in...