A successful novel that was also converted into a play with the help of the author's husband, Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Lady of Quality (1896) presents the story of the English gentry at the end of the seventeenth century. Taking historical events as the backdrop for her work, Burnett creates a protagonist who is determined to have her own way.

First published in 1896, A Lady of Quality may have had its beginning "in a dark back chamber, revealed at the end of one of the corridors by the chance scratching of a match" in Portland Place, where Frances Hodgson Burnett was living. The house had a large basement area with long underground passages leading out to the Mews behind, about which Burnett is said to have remarked, "What a place to hide the body of a man you had accidentally killed." Thought of as a departure from her previous work, and set in the early Eighteenth Century, the body in question turns out to be that of Sir John Oxon, killed with riding whip by the book's heroine, Clorinda Wildairs: A Lady of Quality is a novel about the invincibility of the human spirit, the refusal of a woman to be mild and submissive, the acceptance of all experience, and courage born of adversity.