Craik, MRS. Dinah Maria Mulock, well known as the author of John Halifax, Gentleman, was born at Stoke-upon-Trent in 1826. She early took the burden of supporting an ailing mother and two younger brothers, and wrote stories for fashion-books, as well as for graver publications. Her first serious appearance as a novelist was in 1849, with her story The Ogilvies, which was followed by Olive, The Head of the Family, and Agatha's Husband. But she never surpassed or even equalled her domestic novel John Halifax (1857), which has had, and still continues to have an extraordinary popularity, and has been translated into French, German, Italian, Greek, and Russian. The scene is laid at Tewkesbury, where a marble medallion has been placed to her memory in the abbey. A pension of £60 a year, awarded to her in 1864, she set aside for authors less fortunate than herself. In 1865 she married Mr George Lillie Craik, a partner in the publishing house of Macmillan & Co. (nephew of the subject of the preceding article), and spent a period of quiet happiness and successful literary industry at her home, Corner House, Shortlands, Kent, where she died 12th October 1887. Much of Mrs Craik's verse is collected in Thirty Years' Poems (1881). She wrote a good deal for the magazines, and produced in all forty-six works, viz.—fourteen more novels, and several volumes of prose essays, including A Woman's Thoughts about Women (1858), and Concerning Men, and other Papers (1888). See
Mrs Oliphant's sketch in Macmillan's Magazine (1887).