1848–1899 · Canadian science writer, evolutionist & novelist
Grant Allen was born on Wolfe Island near Kingston in 1848, studied at Merton College, Oxford, and became one of the late-Victorian era’s busiest popularisers of evolution — roughly thirty novels between 1884 and 1899 alongside a steady stream of science essays. His scandalous bestseller The Woman Who Did (1895) made him notorious; his weekly Westminster Gazette columns, collected as Post-Prandial Philosophy in 1894, made him quotable. He died at Hindhead in 1899, and within a decade his best line had quietly changed owners.