Adeline Sergeant

Adeline Sergeant (4 July 1851 – 4 December 1904) was a prolific English writer of the Victorian era. She wrote over ninety novels during her lifetime, including Jacobi's Wife.

Early life and education Born Emily Frances Adeline Sergeant at Ashbourne, Derbyshire, the second daughter of Richard Sergeant and Jane (Hall), with a short introduction by her mother, were published in a volume that received positive notice in Wesleyan periodicals. She won a scholarship to attend Queen's College, London. Her father died in 1870, and for several years she worked as a governess at Riverhead, Kent. For the next several years her writings were serialized in this Dundee publication, where she lived from 1885 to 1887.

In 1888 Sergeant sold A Dead Man's Trust to W. C. Leng and Co., which ran a newspaper syndication service based in Sheffield. The story appeared in several British and Australian newspapers, but does not appear to have been published separately as a book under this title. Sometime later, Tillotson's Fiction Bureau, a rival operation based in Bolton, Lancashire, offered Sergeant a five-year contract to produce a full-length serial and a short story totalling around 160,000 words annually, for which she was paid £162 per annum. Around this time, Sergeant moved to Bloomsbury, London, where she earned enough to support herself through her writings.