Margaret Wolfe Hungerford

Margaret Wolfe Hungerford (1855–1897) was an Irish novelist who published under the pen name "The Duchess". She was writing by her teens, and her first novel, Phyllis, appeared anonymously in 1877; widowed soon after with three young daughters, she kept a working routine of three hours every morning and produced roughly sixty novels and story collections. Her light romantic fiction sold well across England, America and Australia in the late Victorian years, favouring Irish settings, fashionable society and quick flirtatious dialogue over psychological depth. Molly Bawn (1878) remains her best-known book and the source of her most quoted line.