To her professed astonishment Lady Annie Brassey's first widely published and most famous book, Around the World in the Yacht "Sunbeam" (1878), propelled her to instant and international celebrity. It sold so quickly that its sixth edition appeared within a year of its initial printing, and by 1881 it had so endeared itself to British readers that Longmans, Green published an edition "adapted for school and class reading" that stayed in print for a decade; the narrative remained in print for thirty years in both French and English. Sunshine and Storm in the East; or, Cruises to Cyprus and Constantinople (1880) and In the Trades, the Tropics, & the Roaring Forties (1885), Lady Brassey's two later "Sunbeam" books, also fared well. Each remained in print in both French and English well into the 1890s, and the latter was even translated into German during the 1880s.

Brassey relates an anecdote in Trades that suggests...