Adeline Sergeant (1851–1904)

Emily Frances Adeline Sergeant was born in Ashbourne, Derbyshire, to a literary and spiritual family. Her father Richard Sergeant was a Wesleyan preacher, and her mother Jane Hall Sergeant, wrote poems and stories for young people under the pen name "Adeline." Emily later adopted this as her own pen name. She was educated at home until age 13, when she went to school in Weston-super-Mare. At 15, she published a collection of poems that was reviewed favorably in Weslayan periodicals. She won a scholarship to attend Queen's College, London. After her father died in 1870, Adeline went to work as a governess for a family in Kent for 10 years.

In 1882, her novel Jacobi's Wife, which she wrote while visiting Egypt with friends, won a small prize and was later published serially in London. For the next several years, she wrote two or three novels a year that were serialized exclusively in the Dundee newspaper. From 1887, Adeline lived in Bloomsbury, London, where she joined the Fabian Society and took an active role in humanitarian work. She also traveled widely abroad. During her career, she produced more than 90 novels, with 14 of them published posthumously. She also served as a literary adviser to the publishing company R. Bentley & Sons.