Dorothy Kathleen Broster's writing career spanned the period from just before World War I until just after World War II, and this turbulent period of uncertainty and conflict may well have influenced the attitudes encoded in her work. Her books, most of them historical romances set during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period or the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 and its aftermath, were very popular. Though not specifically written for adolescents they attracted a wide reading public including many young readers, and her most famous book, The Flight of the Heron (1925), was produced by BBC Scotland in 1976 as a six-part television serial and broadcast at a time suitable for children's viewing.

Broster wrote, in an undated typescript for a speech kept at St. Hilda's College, Oxford, that "it is not easy to make a good blend of history and fiction," yet she always strove to reconcile the two...