Grace Aguilar, author of short stories, novels, and religious writings, was the only Anglo-Jewish woman in the nineteenth century to achieve considerable success as a writer. In addition to writing for gift-books and periodicals, in her lifetime she published a book of poetry, a single novel, a translation, a work on women's Biblical history, and two books of non-fiction on Jewish topics. As many additional volumes appeared posthumously.

Grace Aguilar's domestic and historical fiction treats both Jewish and Gentile materials. She wrote in a crypto-Jewish tradition which placed mothers at the centre of religious survival, shifting importance away from the public and formal instruction of the synagogue towards domestic training, story-telling, and maternal influence. Among Anglo-Jewish writers of the period, her work was unparallelled in its scope and its popularity with Jewish and Christian audiences, in Britain and the US. One tribute from Jewish women in the US called her the "moral governess of the Hebrew family."