Once dismissed as a "purveyor of dangerous inflammatory fiction," Florence Marryat has suffered a reputation as a trashy and formulaic novelist, unworthy of critical attention. / Critics have consistently overlooked the radicalism of her work, which confronts themes such as marital violence, single motherhood, and female sexuality. By gathering evidence from across the range of her fiction, Catherine Pope establishes Marryat as an important feminist writer - one who consistently challenged prevailing ideas of femininity in both her life and her work. / With a life neatly spanning the Victorian period, Marryat (1833-99) was well placed to experience and to observe the ways in which women's lives were transformed during the nineteenth century.