ABSTRACT
During the 1890s Grant Allen was most often to be associated with men of letters.
In Holbrook Jackson’s seminal account of the decade, he is listed as one of those
whose ‘literary reputations beginning in the Seventies and Eighties, and only in a
few cases awaiting buttressing in the Nineties, were numerous; these … included
W.H. Mallock, Edmund Gosse, Andrew Lang, Robert Louis Stevenson, Frederic
Harrison, William Ernest Henley, John Addington Symonds, Arthur Pinero, Sidney
Colvin, Austin Dobson, Edward Dowden, H.D. Traill, Theodore Watts-Dunton,
Stopford Brooke, James Payn, Leslie Stephen, Henry James, Grant Allen, William
Black, Frederick Wedmore, and among more popular writers, Marie Corelli, Rider
Haggard, and Hall Caine.’1
