Evelyn Sharp, whose career occupied the end of the nineteenth century and the first several decades of the twentieth, wrote books for children, journalism, polemic (on behalf of suffragist, internationalist, pacifist, and other movements), novels, travel books, biography, and studies of education, poverty, and other social issues. Her output for children alone amounted to more than twenty books as well as stories counted in the hundreds. Important in this field, and as a suffragist activist and publicist, and with a high professional reputation as a journalist, she made less impression as a novelist (although her fiction is original and inventive). She was later forgotten more completely than almost any of her contemporaries of equal stature.
Milestones
4 August 1869 ES was born in
Denmark Hill in
South London. She was the ninth child and youngest girl out of eleven children born, of whom nine survived beyond childhood.
October 1896 Atalanta began serialising in six parts a short novel for children or young people by Evelyn Sharp, which as a book, 1897, became
The Making of a School Girl, dedicated to her own old headmistress,
Miss Spark, as 'J. E. S.'
By late June 1910 Evelyn Sharp published a volume of true stories entitled
Rebel Women, which draws its riveting material from individual experiences in the suffrage struggle.
November 1948 Another selection of writing by
Henry Nevinson appeared in print after long gestation, edited by
Henry Noel Brailsford with help from ES:
Essays, Poems and Tales, including excerpts from ten of Nevinson's books.
