First published in 1850

Olive traces its eponymous heroine's progress from her ill-starred birth to maturity as a painter and wife. The crippled child of parents who are disgusted by her physical imperfection, a curvature of the spine, Olive struggles to take her place in the world as artist and woman.

Published three years after Jane Eyre, Olive's swift fictional response to Charlotte Bronte's novel raises questions of family, race, and nation. This edition also includes The Half-Caste, a story that confronts questions of miscegenation and racial prejudice in Victorian Britain.

(Excerpt from Goodreads)