Robert Williams Buchanan

She wrote the piece because she was incensed by Oxford professor John Campbell Shairp 's attack on Rossetti (which built on criticism begun by Robert Buchanan a decade and a half earlier).

It took her three years to find a publisher willing to take on its controversial subject-matter.Blackwood refused it. George Meredith , as a reader for Chapman and Hall , rejected it, advising SG

The novel met with great and instantaneous success, though it was frequently assumed to be the work of Charles Reade . A New York edition appeared that same year, and successive British editions followed...

Robert Williams Buchanan contributed a brief preface arguing that in depicting Irish life as bitterly harsh HJ was expressing sympathy, not anti-Irish sentiment. Like most of her novels, it had a New York edition simultaneous...

RB earned £1,000 for the volume rights alone, the highest she had yet received for a novel. Robert Buchanan 's theatrical adaptation entitled Sweet Nancy had an only moderately successful run on stage in 1890...

In 1896 (a busy year for Jay), she and Buchanan co-wrote a third play, The New Don Quixote.

HJ travelled with Robert Buchanan to Philadelphia to oversee the production of their jointly written Alone in London (which did very well). They crossed to New York, where Jay made her American stage debut.