John Halifax, Gentleman is a novel by Dinah Maria Craik, and it stands as the work most closely associated with her name. She wrote it in English, one of several languages — alongside Italian, Latin, and Greek — in which she worked across her literary career.

Craik was born on 20 April 1826 in Stoke-on-Trent and received her education at Bedford College. A citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, she pursued writing as her vocation, working across a range of forms: she was a novelist, a poet, an essayist, and a children's writer. That breadth placed her among the more versatile writers of her period, and her engagement with multiple languages suggests a scholarly formation that extended well beyond the literary conventions of her immediate milieu.

The Little Lame Prince and his Travelling Cloak is the other named work that survives from her output, and it belongs to her work as a children's writer rather than to the novelistic tradition represented by John Halifax, Gentleman. That she moved between writing for children and the longer form of the novel, while also producing poetry and essays, points to the range she brought to her practice as a writer. Her essays formed a distinct strand of that output, separate from her fiction and her verse.

Craik died on 12 October 1887 in Shortlands. Her career had taken her from Stoke-on-Trent and her education at Bedford College through decades of work in prose, poetry, and essay — leaving behind, among other titles, both John Halifax, Gentleman and The Little Lame Prince and his Travelling Cloak as named markers of what she produced.