In 1825 Thomas Moore claimed that the talents of Alicia LeFanu were ‘another proof of the sort of gavel-kind of genius allotted to the whole race of Sheridan’. Though his expression is oblique his point makes one thing quite clear: Alicia LeFanu's contribution to her family's literary history was as significant as that of her better-known relations. Moore's allusion to a system of property succession in which all descendants inherited equally comes in his biographical study of LeFanu's famous uncle, the dramatist and Member of Parliament, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, and reaffirms the acknowledgement he gives to LeFanu in his preface. Moore's biography appeared a year after Alicia LeFanu published her own family history entitled Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs Frances Sheridan, Mother of the Late Right Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1824). Moore was indebted to the assistance afforded him by its ‘highly gifted’ author and LeFanu remains very much at the centre of what is known of this distinguished line. That by 1825 LeFanu had also published two lengthy poems and five novels is more extensive proof of her talents. As the first of six novels LeFanu completed between 1816 and 1826, Strathallan demonstrates, for the first time, the ingenuity and versatility of a writer whose professional career established her as a significant contemporary of Austen and Scott.

Born in Dublin in 1791, Alicia LeFanu was the daughter of Elizabeth ‘Betsey’ Sheridan, who was Richard Brinsley's sister and the youngest of the four surviving children of Frances and Thomas Sheridan. Given the Sheridan family's tradition of passing on names as well as genius, a brief sketch of its most prominent members clarifies the personal and professional legacy to which Alicia LeFanu contributed her own ‘first attempt’. LeFanu's grandfather, Thomas, earned renown as a lexicographer, but his early career as an actor and manager of Dublin's Smock Alley theatre had been encouraged by his father, the poet Dr Thomas Sheridan, and fostered in the company of his godfather Jonathan Swift.