Biographies
Grant Allen (1848-1899)
Grant Allen (1848-1899), born in Canada but educated at Oxford, was a prolific Victorian writer, both of fiction and non-fiction. A friend of Conan Doyle’s, Allen’s novels were likewise in a popular mode, with strong female heroines, including female detectives, and the radical The Woman Who Did (1895), about a woman who refuses to marry her lover in protest against the marriage laws. On the non-fiction side, his interests ran to contemporary scientific and evolutionary issues, including Physiological Aesthetics (1877), Evolutionist at Large (1881) and Evolution of the Idea of God (1897).