Although her earliest novel was most famous for its scandalous impropriety, Julia Frankau's writing was admired by critics and popular on both sides of the Atlantic in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century. Frankau's first novel, Dr. Phillips: A Maida Vale Idyll (1887), published, like all her novels, under the pseudonym ‘Frank Danby’, stoked significant controversy for its caustic portrayal of the affluent West End Anglo-Jewish community in which she was raised.1 While Frankau's two subsequent novels met with some critical success and popular interest, it was not until the publication of Pigs in Clover (1903) – her first after a twelve-year hiatus during which she contributed regularly to the Saturday Review and published several historical and art historical texts – that her literary reputation was firmly established. Sarah Gracombe suggests that Pigs in Clover redresses the prejudice presented in Dr. Phillips in its ‘far more complex, sympathetic look at Jewishness’. Frankau's later novels relinquish the naturalism and melodrama that are characteristic of her earliest work and treat social and political questions with greater nuance; yet subjects such as colonialism, race, sexuality and gender all remain strong themes.

The popular success of her novel The Heart of a Child (1908) – there were at least two film versions of the story made, one an early Hollywood film – owes something to its basis on the Cinderella story popularised in the nineteenth century by the Brothers Grimm. However, the sentimentality that results from this theme is kept in check by the satirical tone that characterises Frankau's fiction. The Heart of a Child traces the ‘meteoric’ career of a woman who begins life as Sally Snape and who, at the novel's conclusion, is Lady Kidderminster. One reviewer described the familiar story, which is also the plot of Elinor Glyn's The Career of Katharine Bush (1916) and W. B. Maxwell's Vivien (1905), as one of the ‘female climber to fame’ by way of the route of ‘social success’ Yet to focus on the novel’s representation of housing contradicts the heroine's ascent, for in her social climbing she experiences various restrictions that emerge from women's association with domesticity across classes. While Sally’s access to housing improves and she is materially better off at the novel's conclusion, throughout the narrative she is limited and often imperilled by the social implications of the unconventional dwellings that she inhabits.