Lady Elizabeth arrives at Courtenay Grange to meet her stepchildren. Her father, the Earl of Greatlands, takes a liking to Dora, who lacks self-confidence due to her sister's constant bullying. Busy trying not to embarrass herself in front of Elizabeth, Dora is entirely unprepared for what lies ahead. The Adventures of an Ugly Girl is a novel by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett.

Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbett (1846-1930) was an English novelist, journalist, and feminist. In addition to her work for the Newcastle Daily Chronicle, Corbett was a popular adventure and detective writer whose work appeared in some of the Victorian era's leading magazines and periodicals. In response to Mrs Humphrey Ward's "An Appeal Against Female Suffrage," published in The Nineteenth Century in 1889, Corbett wrote New Amazonia: A Foretaste of the Future (1889), a feminist utopian novel set in a futuristic Ireland. Despite publishing a dozen novels and two collections of short fiction, Corbett-who was once described by Hearth and Home as a master of the detective novel alongside Arthur Conan Doyle-remains largely unheard of by scholars and readers today.