The busiest man in England

the long version

"Despite his lifelong ill health and relatively short life, Grant Allen (1848-1899) was a writer of extraordinary productivity and range. His work reflects interests from Darwinian biology to cultural travel guides. His prosperity, however, was underpinned by fiction: he wrote more than thirty novels, including The Woman Who Did, which has attracted much recent attention from feminist critics and historians. This book is the first critical biography of Allen in a century, and it draws from all the surviving primary sources. "The Busiest Man in England" uses Allen's career to examine the role and status of the freelance author/journalist in the late Victorian period, and analyzes what it took to succeed in this notoriously tough profession."--BOOK JACKET.