narrative_location the man in grey 
Lady Eleanor Furneaux Smith ( 1902 , Birkenhead  1945 ) was an English writer . The eldest of the politician F . E . Smith ' s three children , she worked as a society reporter and cinema reviewer for a while , then as a publicist for circus companies . In the latter role she travelled more widely , and gained inspiration for her third career , writing popular novels and short stories which often provided the basis for the ' Gainsborough melodramas ' of the period . These stories often had a romanticised historical or Gypsy setting , based on her own research into Romany culture ( she believed one of her paternal great - grandmothers to have been a Gypsy ). Smith also wrote ghost stories ; many of them were collected in her book " Satan ' s Circus " ( 1932 ). Smith was a supporter of the Conservative Party . The Man in Grey was a novel by the British writer Lady Eleanor Smith first published in 1941 . It was a melodrama set in Regency Britain . A young woman unhappily married to a cold aristocrat falls in love with a strolling actor , but her hopes of eloping to happiness are wrecked by an old school friend who murders her in order to be able to marry her husband . The Gainsborough melodramas were a sequence of films produced by the British film studio Gainsborough Pictures during the 1940s which conformed to a melodramatic style . The melodramas were not a film series but an unrelated sequence of films which had similar themes and frequently recurring actors who played similar characters in each . The popularity of the films with audiences peaked in the immediate post - war years , but production of such films lasted until the end of Gainsborough in 1949 . The success of the films led to other British producers releasing similarly - themed works such as " The Seventh Veil ", " Idol of ___MASK86___ " and " Pink String and Sealing Wax ". Birkenhead is a town within the Metropolitan Borough of Wirral in Merseyside , ___MASK41___ . Historically in Cheshire , it is on the Wirral Peninsula , along the west bank of the River Mersey , opposite the city of Liverpool . The Birkenhead Urban Area defined as the contiguous built - up area along the eastern side of the Wirral had a total population of 325 , 264 in the 2011 Census . In the 2011 census , the Parliamentary constituency of Birkenhead had a population of 88 , 818 . The Birkenhead and Tranmere electoral ward , covering a much smaller area , had a population of 15 , 879 .