Although Adelaide Eden Phillpotts Ross and her works have virtually disappeared from sight, her publishing career spanned some seventy-five years. Compared to her father, Eden Phillpotts, who published more than 225 books, her output is small: between 1916 and 1991 she published 37 books in a variety of genres. Although largely neglected by critics even in her own day, she produced novels, plays, and poems of great charm that show considerable talent. Many of her works are realistic portrayals of women who share a capacity for suffering, a suspicion of middle-class values, and a distrust in the ability of men to make women happy.

Mary Adelaide Eden Phillpotts was born on 23 April 1896 at Ealing, the second of two children of Eden and Emily Topham Phillpotts. She grew up in a home in Devon that was dominated by writing. In Reverie: An Autobiography (1981) she relates, "We had to be silent when our father...