Borneo, Greece, Canada, Bolivia, Mexico, France, Argentina, Australia, Serbia, the western United States--Bessie Marchant took her readers on adventures all around the globe in her more than 130 novels. Yet for all the varieties of settings, the worlds of Marchant's novels appear remarkably the same, for readers see these settings through the eyes of Marchant's female heroines, the vision of the only slightly modern British woman.

Certainly that vision comes out of Marchant's own development. Born in 1862 in Pentham in Kent, Bessie Marchant received a typical Victorian education at private schools. She married Jabez Ambrose Comfort at age thirty-seven. The couple had one daughter together and lived in Charlbury, Oxfordshire, where Marchant wrote most of her adventures. Her first novel, The Old House by the Water (1894), was published before she married, but it was as a married woman that her career blossomed. A prolific writer, she published an average...