Charlotte Riddell

Charlotte Riddell was born in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, Ireland, on 30 September 1832, the youngest daughter of James Cowan, High Sheriff for the County of Antrim. She left that coastal town behind, moving to London in the winter of 1855 after her father's death, where she eventually married Joseph Hadley Riddell and began writing novels under the pseudonym F. G. Trafford. The young woman from a sheriff's household became a prominent Victorian author, producing fifty-six books and editing St. James's Magazine before retiring into seclusion and dying in Ashford, Kent, in 1906.