In the fall of 1899 the title of Mary Cholmondeley's latest novel was on everyone's lips. "Have you read Pottage"" readers punningly asked one another, referring to Cholmondeley's best-selling Red Pottage. There were few who had not read it; two months after its release the book was already in its third edition, having sold more than eighteen thousand copies in England alone. Red Pottage made Cholmondeley's reputation, and it remains a powerful illustration of English provincial life and of the limited opportunities available to unmarried women in the late nineteenth century.

The third child and eldest daughter of Richard Hugh and Emily Beaumont Cholmondeley's eight children, Mary Cholmondeley was born in Hodnet, Shropshire, on 8 June 1859. Although in Under One Roof: A Family Record, her 1918 family memoir, Cholmondeley's childhood appears happy and full of country pleasures, it also had its darker side: to Percy Lubbock, who published a memoir of...