Born the daughter of a nonconformist minister in Stoke-on-Trent in Staffordshire, Dinah Mulock took her mother and siblings to London and supported them by writing novels, the most successful of which, John Halifax, Gentleman (1856), enabled her eventually to build Corner House in Shortlands, Kent, where she spent the rest of her life. She married George Lillie Craik, of the Macmillan publishing firm, in 1865; and they adopted a daughter. She published three volumes of poetry: Poems (1859), Songs of Our Youth, and Thirty Years: Being Poems Old and New (1881). Sally Mitchell has written the most recent biography, Dinah Mulock Craik (Boston: Twayne, 1983; PR 4517 M57 Robarts Library).

• Mitchell, Sally. “Craik , Dinah Maria (1826-1887).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. Oxford: OUP, 2004.