Prolific, versatile, original, even profound, Grant Allen dedicated his life to the quest for incontrovertible knowledge through the written word. Celebrated not only as a writer of literature and criticism but as a historian, naturalist, anthropologist, biographer, and physicist, Allen made lasting contributions to Victorian and twentieth-century thought. He was at once a man of his age and a man who helped to give his age the shape of modernism.

He was born Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen on 24 February 1848 at Alwington, near Kingston, Ontario. His father, J. Antisell Allen, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, was an Irish church minister who immigrated to Canada in 1840. His mother, Charlotte Catherine Ann Grant, was the only daughter of Charles William, fifth Baron de Longueuil, whose family had come to Canada in 1746. Grant Allen spent most of his youth in Canada, in and around Wolfe Island and Howe Island in the...