number 150 of this Centenary edition limited to 200 copies & signed by Cordelia Stamp the producer & publisher of the book. In the short space of twenty years Mary Linskill composed three major novels, half a dozen shorter books and a handful of short stories, some of which are here reproduced. She had no comfortable rectory to shelter her, no private income and no husband to protect her. Her parents were not well off, she was brought up in poverty, but a 'genteel' poverty which hid its hardships from the world. Employment for women in Mary's time was minimal. She was not of the class which could find work in domestic service. Shop assistants were usually men and the fisher women, her neighbours, worked within their own close community, collecting mussels and baiting the lines for their menfolk. She determined to write and in so doing she created a gulf between herself and the non-literate community in which she lived. Even her own family did not understand and called her 'Lady Jane' in a mocking manner. Nevertheless she persevered. It is interesting to speculate the outcome had she been writing only a decade earlier, while Charles Dickens was still living, for it was he who had helped and encouraged Mrs Gaskell by publishing her stories in All the Year Round. Kindly interest and encouragement are essential to a creative artist and Dickens might well have helped Mary. As it was, she had no mentor in the early days. We who come a hundred years after she died can only be thankful that she managed to write as much as she did.