Robert Bage was a paper miller in Elford, Staffordshire, who began writing novels when he was more than fifty years old. Needing diversion from his anxiety over financial losses he had recently suffered in his business, he turned his hand to a story called Mount Henneth , which he sold to the bookseller Thomas Lowndes for thirty pounds; Lowndes published the book in 1782. Bage produced five more novels during the next fifteen years, all gracefully written and all addressed to the most urgent and vexing political and social controversies of the day. A modest man, Bage never signed his name to any of his books, which nevertheless earned him considerable popular recognition and praise from the critics. His political liberalism eventually caused him to fall out of favor in the wave of conservatism that swept over England in the nineteenth century; but today this gentle, intelligent, unpretentious writer enjoys...