The life of a novelist as his friend saw it: years of rejection, a father who despises the work, a girl who waits, and the slow arrival of a reputation. Edna Lyall was Ada Ellen Bayly, a clergyman's daughter who took a near-anagram of her own name and wrote novels that argued - for Irish Home Rule, for women, for freethinkers. This 1889 book is her quietest, and the publishing detail is exact.