Rhoda Broughton

Rhoda Broughton was a Welsh-born novelist whose frank, high-spirited heroines shocked the 1860s: her books were kept off the shelves of Oxford drawing rooms while everyone read them. A niece of Sheridan Le Fanu, who published her first novel, she outlived the scandal entirely and observed that she had begun as Zola and ended as Miss Yonge, without changing at all.