William Allison was a pen name of Alice Muriel Williamson (born Alice Muriel King), an American-English author. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1858, she adopted the surname Livingston after separating from her first husband, before relocating to England in 1892 as a foreign correspondent for the Boston Evening Transcript.

​

In 1894, she married British magazine editor Charles Norris Williamson. Her early publications included serials in periodicals such as the Daily Mail and Forget-Me-Not, where her first serial, Confessions of a Stage-Struck Girl, appeared in 1894.

​

In 1902, she published The Lightning Conductor, a novel combining travelogue elements with early motorcar culture, which sold more than a million copies in America. This, alongside other novels, was published in collaboration with her husband under the joint byline C. N. and A. M. Williamson, although she later stated that she was the sole author of many of these works.

​

Additionally, she authored solo works encompassing detective fiction, Gothic thrillers, and serials. To manage her literary output across different genres, Williamson used multiple pseudonyms, including Alice Stuyvesant, John Colin Dane, Alice Livingston, and William Allison. Her works were translated and published in France, Holland, and Switzerland, and several were adapted into silent films.

​

She died of an overdose in Bath, England, in 1933. An inquest ruled this as accidental.