Alice Muriel Williamson

Despite the fact that C. N. never wrote any fiction bearing his name, acknowledged by his wife many years later, the view erroneously persists that the two were joint authors. Much is known about Charles, the highly respected editor of Black and White and several other journals of the 1890s, but virtually nothing about his wife, the true author, except that she was American, had formerly been an actress, and went to England intending to pursue journalism. Her autobiography, The Inky Way, published two years before her death in 1933, begins curiously in media res with her journey to England in 1892, and remains conspicuously silent about all that preceded that voyage. It is the purpose of this biography to supply the missing chapters of her previous life in America, providing hitherto unknown details about her several earlier careers as actress, journalist, and author of fiction.