The forty-year career of the writer known as Victoria Cross comprises twenty-three novels and three collections of short stories. Her notorious books--with their exotic settings, erotic events, and exuberantly imaginative invention--were read and reviewed around the world, from Singapore to Switzerland. She was known, according to Sewell Stokes, as a "veritable Noel Coward of the early Nineties." Oscar Wilde even tried to play literary matchmaker: "If one could only marry Thomas Hardy to Victoria Cross," he remarked, "he might have gained some inkling of real passion with which to animate his little keepsake pictures of starched ladies." She published most of her novels in the early years of the twentieth century, and the titles were familiar enough to be used as points of reference by other writers. In Katherine Mansfield's story "The Tiredness of Rosabel" (1908) a young woman on a bus begins to daydream of romance when she...