"The Rock Ahead" features a strong and self-confident woman Gertrude Lloyd, who becomes a famous opera singer after leaving her husband, a murderer.

Edmund Hodgson Yates (1831-1894) was a British journalist, novelist and dramatist. His first career was a clerk in the General Post Office, becoming in 1862 head of the missing letter department, and where he stayed until 1872. Meanwhile, he entered journalism, working on the "Court Journal" and then "Daily News", under Charles Dickens. In 1854 he published his first book "My Haunts and their Frequenters", after which followed a succession of novels and plays.