A Little Mother to the Others is the history of four fascinating little mortals, who surely have not merited their cruel fate. Their mother dies, their father goes off to the Himalayas, and they are left in the care of a well-meaning but hard-hearted aunt from whom they are stolen by gipsies, and sold to a circus. —The Athenaeum, No. 3610, Jan 2, 1897
Author
Mrs. L.T. Meade (Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Toulmin Smith), was a prolific children's author of Anglo Irish extraction. Born in 1844, Meade was the eldest daughter of a Protestant clergyman, whose church was in County Cork. Moving from Ireland to London as a young woman, after the death of her mother, she studied in the Reading Room of the British Museum in preparation for her intended career as a writer, before marrying Alfred Toulmin Smith in September 1879. The author of close to 300 books, Meade wrote in many genres, but is best known for her girls' school stories. She was one of the editors of the girls' magazine, Atalanta from 1887-93, and was active in women's issues. She died in 1914.
