The gates of Eden

Annie Shepherd Swan (8 July 1859 - 17 June 1943) was a Scottish journalist, novelist and story writer. She used her maiden name for most of her literary career, but also wrote as David Lyall and later Mrs Burnett Smith. She was a popular writer of romantic fiction for young women during the Victorian era and published more than 200 novels, serials, short stories and other fiction between 1878 and her death in 1943 Swan was one of the seven children of Edward Swan (d. 1893), a farmer and merchant, by his first wife, Euphemia Brown (d. 1881). After her father's business failed, she attended school in Edinburgh, latterly at the Queen Street Ladies College. Her father belonged to an Evangelical Union congregation, but she turned in adulthood to the Church of Scotland. She persistently wrote fiction as a teenager