Rita

Rita was the pen name of Eliza Humphreys (1850–1938), a Scottish-born novelist raised in Australia who returned to Britain as a young woman and published her first novel in 1877. Over the next sixty years she wrote some 120 books, light society romances for the most part, with occasional satire such as Souls in 1903, and shorter pieces like The Mystery of a Turkish Bath. She was widely read in the circulating libraries and much reprinted in cheap editions, and in later life she was active in the Writers' Club and in campaigning for authors' interests. Her memoir, Recollections of a Literary Life, appeared in 1936.