Dot Allan was not only a Glasgow West End lady but a successful novelist and freelance journalist, a career still unusual enough - when she began writing in the 1920s - for a woman of her class, place and time. She wrote several plays early in her career, contributed to a wide range of newspapers and magazines throughout her life, and published ten novels in all. Two of these have recently been republished by the Association for ScottishLiterary Studies: Makeshift (1928), a fairly early (for Scottish literature) and notably outspoken feminist novel, and Hunger March (1934), a 'proletariannovel' set in Glasgow, again early in its field and predating such better-knownexamples as George Blake's The Shipbuilders (1935) and James Barke's MajorOperation (1936). Allan's other pre-World War II novels, less well known (perhaps deservedly) than these, are mostly set in Glasgow. It is after that war, during which, as has been said, she appears to have given her time wholly to nursing and charity work, that her writing takes a new turn: unexpected if one thinks of her as a Glasgow novelist, but not so in the light of her strongly feminist Makeshift. The three post-war novels, Mother of Millions (1953), The Passionate Sisters (1955) and Charity Begins at Home (1958), which are re-issued for the first time in the present volume, are historical novels with female protagonists. We have seen plenty of such novels where the heroines are either queens or countesses in their ...