Frances Brooke was an eighteenth century English novelist, playwright and translator. Best known for her novels The History of Lady Julia Mandeville and The History of Emily Montague, Brooke also published a weekly periodical called Old Maid using the name Mary Singleton, Spinster. Frances Brooke died in 1789.

This charming love story captures the lives of Quebec City's early English-speaking inhabitants, the Québécois, and the Native people, in the decade between Wolfe's victory on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 and the American War of Independence in the 1770s.
First published in 1769, The History of Emily Montague, which brings the 18th-century novel into a New World context, is rightly called Canada's - indeed North America's - first novel.