Adeline Georgiana Isabel Wolff was born in 1862. She was the only daughter of Henry Drummond Wolff, a diplomat and Conservative MP. Recorded in Who's Who as a traveller and linguist, she compiled a book of Indian folklore, Tales of the Sun, or, Folklore of Southern India, and a work entitled The English Baby in India and How to Rear it. However she was best known as a novelist.
Her most famous novel was a response to Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did. The first edition of Cleeve's The Woman Who Wouldn't (1895) sold well but received hostile reviews. She said of this:
If one young girl is kept from a loveless, mistaken marriage, if one frivolous nature is checked in her career of flirtation by remembrance of Lady Morris, I shall perhaps be forgiven by the public for raising my feeble voice in answer to The Woman Who Did.[1]
One of her sons, Algernon Kingscote, became a notable tennis player.
She died in Château-d'Œx, Switzerland, 1908.[2]
