Grant Allen

Grant Allen (1848–1899) was born near Kingston, Ontario, the son of an Irish-born clergyman, and was educated in France, England and at Merton College, Oxford. He began as a science writer, publishing Physiological Aesthetics (1877), before turning to fiction under the pseudonym J. Arbuthnot Wilson. His novel The Woman Who Did (1895), about a woman who rejects marriage, scandalized readers and became a bestseller; he also wrote the crime collection An African Millionaire (1897) and the romance Linnet (1898). He died of liver cancer at his home in Hindhead, Surrey, leaving his last novel, Hilda Wade, to be finished by his friend and neighbor Arthur Conan Doyle.