Ellen Pickering

Ellen Pickering was an English novelist who wrote sixteen three-volume novels for the circulating-library market between the mid-1820s and her death in 1843. She was popular and professionally successful in her lifetime — Nan Darrell (1839) was reprinted into the 1860s — but her books were published in the anonymous “by the author of” style of the period, and her name faded fast after she died of scarlet fever at Bath on 25 November 1843. Her best-known sentence has spent well over a century attributed to Charles Dickens.