Ol'ga Shapir established a successful career as a popular fiction writer while energetically participating in social and feminist activism. While her works treat a broad range of themes, much of her fiction focuses on the problem of women's oppression in Russian society. Her familiarity with the liberal and revolutionary movements from 1866 to 1916 also informs many of her works, although she usually depicts family conflicts on a much smaller scale.

The youngest of nine children, Ol'ga Andreevna Kisliakova was born on 10 September 1850 in Oranienbaum (now Lomonosov), Russia, about twenty-five miles west of St. Petersburg, on the Gulf of Finland. Her father, Andrei Petrovich Kisliakov, a former serf who advanced to become an estate manager, owed his position to the support of several escaped Decembrists. Kisliakova's maternal grandmother, a descendent of Swedish aristocrats, lived with the family and assisted at the births of all nine children, including Kisliakova herself, who...