The dark cloud of her childhood was associated with the misadventures of her charmingly irresponsible father. After he had finally deserted her mother, Mary Elizabeth, then in her early twenties, sought economic independence by taking to the stage under an assumed name like one of her own sensational heroines, in bold defiance of the usual Victorian restrictions on young women of respectable middle-class background. This theatrical interlude culminated in the production of her comedietta, The Loves of Arcadia, which opened at the Strand in March 1860. During that same spring she embarked on two other literary enterprises, a lengthy narrative poem on Garibaldi's Sicilian campaign, commissioned by an eccentric Yorkshire squire named John Gilby, and Three Times Dead, a cheerfully lurid potboiler originally brought out by an obscure provincial publisher and quickly republished as The Trail of the Serpent (1861) to capitalize on her sudden celebrity.
Before the end of the year, she was on her own in London, serving her apprenticeship as a writer of fiction while churning out highly spiced thrillers for the barely literate audience of the Halfpenny Journal and Reynolds's Miscellany.
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