Netta Syrett--author of thirty-eight novels, twenty-seven short stories, four plays, and twenty children's books--received contemporary accolades from such notable figures as Henry Harland, John Lane, Max Beerbohm, and W. Somerset Maugham. Her novel Portrait of a Rebel (1929) became the 1936 movie A Woman Rebels starring Katharine Hepburn. The Victorians (1915) was republished as Rose Cottingham by the Chicago Academy Press in 1978. Many of her novels, such as Three Women (1912) and Rose Cottingham Married (1916), are gaining attention as New Woman efforts.

Current critical notice of Syrett, however, mainly clusters around her participation in the 1890s Yellow Book milieu, which she recorded in her autobiography, The Sheltering Tree (1939), and the novel Strange Marriage (1930). In the Yellow Book section of British Short Fiction in the Nineteenth Century (1979), Wendell V. Harris commends Syrett as a realist writer of the 1890s whose short stories are "worth preserving." A. Brisau places Syrett with the Yellow Book...