Ella Hepworth Dixon

Ella Hepworth Dixon was an English author and editor. Her best-known work is the New Woman novel The Story of a Modern Woman, which has been reprinted in the 21st century.

Dixon was born on 27 March 1857 at Essex Villa, Queens Road, Marylebone, London. She was the seventh child in a family of eight born to the Manchester-born William Hepworth Dixon (1821–1879) and Marian MacMahon Dixon, who came from Ireland. William was an editor, and literature and the arts were valued in their house for boys and for girls. His position also brought a circle of writers and thinkers to the house, including Geraldine Jewsbury, T. H. Huxley, Richard Francis Burton, Lord Bulwer Lytton, Sir John Everett Millais, and E. M. Ward.

Dixon received an outstanding education for a young woman at her time, studying briefly at Heidelberg. She and her sister Marion trained at the Academie Julianne and they exhibited their work in the UK before their father died in 1879. Money was tight and she took to writing, so exploiting her family's connections.

Dixon died in London on 12 January 1932 at the age of 74.