A recent article in the Guardian lists the ten bestselling writers in the United States from the year 1900 – a list it describes as ‘ghostly’ – and asks the pertinent question of what happened to these books, challenging its readers to have heard of them, let alone read them. But in the spring of 1900 the same newspaper, like so many others, was hotly debating the sensational success both in England and America of one of them, Mary Cholmondeley's Red Pottage.

Her name itself – pronounced Chumlee – is a trap for the unwary, and it is now largely unknown, but her bestselling novel, currently out of print and read only by academics and English literature students, was one of the best loved scandals of 1899 – ‘Have you read Pottage?’ ran the joke in literary circles. The story begins with adultery and a terrifying scheme of revenge, as one character is forced into an agreement that he will end his own life within a period of five months. His subsequent love for another woman as the time starts to run out provides much of the suspense of the novel. But the most memorable passages are those in which the writer heroine Hester Gresley insists on her independent right to work, even at the cost of her own steadily dwindling health, and to the fury of her narrow-minded clergyman brother, who insists on interpreting her writing as immoral. More than one reader took this as an attack on the Church, and while Cholmondeley was publicly defended in St Paul's Cathedral, there was a storm of protest from more conservative readers and she was denounced by name from at least one pulpit.

The unmarried daughter of a Shropshire rector, Cholmondeley was often presented in the press as an unworldly spinster in the tradition of the Brontë sisters, and the myth of her secluded existence (largely perpetuated by herself) doubtless added something of its own to the fascination with her novel – by the early years of the twentieth century accounts in the press tended to focus on her having written her first novels while living in rural isolation, occluding the rather less romantic fact of her move to London in 1896.