Shipwrecked as a young girl, middle-class Lilly Dawson is kidnapped by smugglers and forced to work as their servant. Terrified by the prospect of a forced marriage, this Victorian Cinderella flees captivity and has to navigate an outside world she finds both oppressive and dangerous. The Story of Lilly Dawson is a romping tale of pirates, outlaws, murder, mistaken identity, lust and betrayal. Best known for The Night Side of Nature, Crowe was one of the most successful women novelists of the mid-nineteenth century. Through her memorable heroine, Crowe insists that woman can "play a noble part in the world's history, if man would . . . not treat her like a full-grown baby to be flattered and spoilt on the one hand, and coerced and restricted on the other, vibrating between royal rule and slavish serfdom". As Ruth Heholt argues in her introduction, The Story of Lilly Dawson places Crowe in the vanguard of the emerging sensation genre and shows her to be a visionary and radical thinker and writer.