First published in 1850, Olive traces its eponymous heroine's progress from her ill-starred birth to maturity as a painter and wife. The crippled child of parents who are disgusted by her physical 'imperfection', a curvature of the spine, Olive struggles to take her place in the world as artist and woman. Published three years after Jane Eyre, Olive's swift fictional response to Charlotte Bronte's novel raises questions of family, race and nation. This edition also includes 'The Half-Caste', a story that confronts questions of miscegenation and racial prejudice in Victorian Britain. (Excerpt from Goodreads)
Dinah Maria Craik; born Dinah Maria Mulock, also often credited as Miss Mulock or Mrs. Craik) (20 April 1826 – 12 October 1887) was an English novelist and poet. Mulock was born at Stoke-on-Trent to Dinah and Thomas Mulock and raised in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, where her father was then minister of a small independent non-conformist congregation. Her childhood and early youth were much affected by his unsettled fortunes, but she obtained a good education from various quarters and felt called to be a writer. (Wikipedia)