Anne Crane was born in Baltimore in 1838, five years before Henry James. During a period beginning in 1864 and ending with her early death in 1872, she became well known for her daring society fiction. Her three novels, published by Boston's quality publisher, pushed the exploration of women's desires and discontents so far and dealt so categorically with the sexual manners of the American leisure class, both in the South and in New York, that Crane acquired a reputation as a scandalous writer. A few weeks after her death, the Nation published a uniquely illnatured obituary note expressing the hope that her immoral influence would cease now that she was dead. The obituarist's wish was gratified. Crane's novels went out of print, and she soon disappeared from the literary record.

But Crane's was an important voice in early American realism, one that had a decisive influence on Henry James. Her 1869 story, “Little Bopeep,” was partly about a young woman who “was the very apotheosis of the ordinary” (387). Crane was one of Howells's first admirers, 2 and in Reginald Archer she would have one of her most conventional ladies “object … to realistic novels, as being too much like life” (237). When the Galaxy was started up in 1866 she was solicited for a story (Crane to Church, 22 February 1866, William Conant Church Papers, NYPL) and soon became a regular contributor; the Atlantic also approached her, but without success.