even his immediate family were unaware of the full extent of his writings. From the early 1870s, Russell published novels using various pseudonyms (Sydney Mostyn, Eliza Rhyl Davies, and Philip Sheldon) with modest success. The adoption of the more feminine pseudonyms, according to Andrew Nash, "arose from his perception of the novel as a feminized form and novel-reading as predominantly a female activity." Adopting many feminine pseudonyms in his early works was a result of the Victorian era belief that certain genres were destined only for certain genders. His early attempts at novels set on land only proved to be a failure, obscured by the nautical novels that had established him as a master of the niche during his time. In conjunction, his poetic and artistic prose and description of the sea facilitated his literary success. The stories of an old seaman at Ramsgate gave him the idea of writing about life at sea, drawing on his own experience. An obituarist of Russell wrote that since the heyday of such writers as Captain Marryat, Michael Scott and Frederick Chamier some thirty or forty years before, "no one in this country had written of the sea from actual knowledge". As Richard D. Graham notes in Masters of Victorian Literature, 1837-1897, "Of living authors, William Clark Russell (1844) is the true successor of Marryat, and may even be said to excel the older writer in the power with which he has described the cruel mystery of the sea, its dangers, and the crimes and superstitions of the men who do business upon it". Russell was at first doubtful if stories of merchant navy life could compete with tales of the Royal Navy: "Only two writers had dealt with the mercantile side of the ocean life – Dana, the author of Two Years before the Mast and Herman Melville, both of them, it is needless to say, Americans. I could not recollect [such] a book written by an Englishman." His first attempt at a novel of merchant navy life was John Holdsworth, Chief Mate during 1875, which Russell later thought of as "reluctant and timid in dealing with sea topics". It received kindly reviews, but Russell regarded his next attempt, The Wreck of the Grosvenor (1877), as his first real sea book. Russell sold the copyright of The Wreck of the Grosvenor to the publisher Sampson Low for £50 (about £21,000 in 2011