When Georgina Weldon died in 1914, she bequeathed all her papers to her friend Lise Gray, fearing that they would be burnt if she left them to her relations. There were hundreds of letters, together with manuscript memoirs, records of her innumerable lawsuits, and twenty-four journals, covering the years from 1852 to 1854, and from 1860 to 1913. Georgina had also published numerous articles, pamphlets and books, together with six volumes of ‘Mémoires Weldon’ – in reality a chaotic compilation of transcripts of letters and legal papers, interspersed with autobiography, all translated into French. In fact all her published works were largely autobiograpical.

The first book about Georgina was A Plaintiff in Person, which was written by her nephew Philip Treherne and published posthumously in 1923. Treherne, who was born in 1872, first visited Georgina in 1893, and he saw her often after that. His biography is uncritical, and he is at his best when recounting his personal reminiscences of his notorious aunt, especially during her latter years.

Lise Gray died in 1923 and her niece, Marjory Pegram, inherited sixty-five packing cases full of Georgina's books and papers, which had remained in a furniture repository in Brighton since Georgina's death. It was, as she wrote, ‘an awe-inspiring sight’. Miss Pegram then spent many years sorting and arranging the archive. She must have thrown a large proportion of the contents of the packing cases away, but much still remained. In the 1950s, she commissioned Edward Grierson to write a new biography. Grierson, a barrister and prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction, was born a few weeks after Georgina's death. His book, Storm Bird, was published in 1959. It is a masterpiece of com-pression and remarkably fair, if one considers that he was a barrister working at a time when there were still lawyers around who remembered Georgina, by repute if not in person. Grierson is particularly good on her court cases, but seems rather to have lost interest towards the end of her life.

In the mid 1970s Marjory Pegram went into a care home and her family decided to dispose of Georgina's papers.