Grant Allen

Grant Allen (1848–1899) was a Canadian-born writer who was educated at Oxford, taught briefly in Jamaica and settled in England as a popularizer of science, publishing books on evolution, physiological aesthetics and flowers in the tradition of Darwin and Spencer. Turning to fiction for money, he wrote some thirty novels and story collections, including the rogue tales of An African Millionaire, the Tyrolean romance Linnet and The Woman Who Did, whose heroine refuses marriage on principle and which caused a scandal in 1895. He was a friend of Conan Doyle, who finished his last novel, Hilda Wade, when Allen died of liver cancer at fifty-one.