Mary Cholmondeley's Red Pottage is among the most regularly ‘almost rediscovered’ books of fin de siècle women's writing. Although it had been one of the most discussed novels of 1899 – and who could resist the pithy catchphrase, ‘Have you read Pottage?’ – its admirers were lamenting its slow slide into oblivion by the time of Cholmondeley's death in 1925 and by 1957 she was apparently unread even in her home county of Shropshire, where she features in a local newspaper article as ‘an almost forgotten’ authoress.

Attempts to revive her reputation have since included two new scholarly editions of her most famous novel, and the resurgence of interest in New Woman writing over the last three decades has brought a number of critical articles on Cholmondeley's work, with most focusing on Red Pottage. But, as often happens, the success of this one novel, the importance of which is now starting to be fully appreciated, has dealt something like a death blow to her other work. For some Red Pottage itself is flawed by its melodramatic suicide plot, a feature that links it to the sensation fiction of the 1860s rather than the more overtly serious New Woman experiments of the fin de siècle. But in any case this device remains an almost wilfully missed opportunity – unlike her most obvious precursors in the sensation genre, Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Cholmondeley has not been treated to a television makeover and has not reached a mass audience in modern times.

That she should seek a wide audience in the first place was a source of consternation to those around her when she first began to publish fiction in the 1880s. Born in Shropshire in 1859, Mary was the fourth child and eldest daughter of Richard Hugh Cholmondeley. The Cholmondeleys were themselves an old and well-regarded family, and they were furthermore related to the Lords Delamere, and by marriage to the illustrious Percy family. In 1855 Richard had married the well-connected Emily Beaumont, from an old Yorkshire family. His appointment to the rectorship of the small but picturesque parish of Hodnet in 1873 meant a return home.