Mary Linskill was a regional novelist, short-story writer, and occasionally a poet, whose fiction is shaped by the Yorkshire port of Whitby: by the place of its abbey in religious history and of its fishing and seafaring during the later nineteenth century, in which she wrote. She also described Whitby in some topographical pieces. What survives of her diary and letters throws some light on what is perhaps (except to her continuing local readership) the most compelling aspect of her career: her prideful, touchy, and desperate struggles to wrest a living from her writing.