Florence Marryat

Florence Marryat (1833–1899) was an English novelist, the daughter of Captain Frederick Marryat, author of Mr. Midshipman Easy. She married at twenty-one, lived in India, and began writing to distract herself while nursing her children through scarlet fever; Love's Conflict appeared in 1865 and some seventy novels followed, including How They Loved Him and The Strange Transfiguration of Hannah Stubbs. She edited the magazine London Society, toured as an actress and singer, and was a committed spiritualist whose account of her séances, There Is No Death, sold widely. Her late novel The Blood of the Vampire appeared in 1897, the same year as Dracula.