Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton (1857-1948) was an American author of novels, short stories, essays, and articles for magazines and newspapers on issues such as feminism, politics, and war. Many of her novels are set in her home state of California. Having been raised by her maternal grandfather, a relative of Benjamin Franklin, in 1876 she eloped with the wealthy George H B Atherton but found life in the San Francisco mansion of her domineering Chilean mother-in-law stultifying. The tragic deaths of both her son and her husband left her free to embark on a writing career, and her first publication was a story serialised in The Argonaut in 1882 which, when she revealed to her family that she was the author, resulted in her being ostracised. Her first novel, What Dreams May Come, was published in 1888 under the pseudonym Frank Lin. After spending time in London, she returned to California in 1890, writing a weekly column for The San Francisco Examiner which led to a long acquaintance with Ambrose Bierce. At this time she began exploring the history and culture of Spanish California and in 1892 published The Doomswoman, a story set in the 1840s with a plot resembling Romeo and Juliet. Later that year Atherton moved to New York, writing for the New York World, but she disliked the belittlement of the West in New York literary circles, and in 1894 published another California novel, Before the Gringo Came. Aspects of Atherton's own unconventional outlook were reflected in her next novel, Patience Sparhawk and Her Times (1897), which takes its heroine on a journey across mid to late 19th century America, from Monterey, California, and ending in West Chester County, New York. Deemed controversial at the time it was written, it is a remarkable story with a gripping conclusion.