Eleanor Farjeon

EF had a particularly long and successful career as an author for children, writing mostly in verse with some prose tales. She also wrote striking memoirs of her childhood and of an unhappy love-affair ended by the First World War, plays (in collaboration with her brother), novels, and adult poetry. She wrote to earn a living, and did not hesitate to recycle slightly revised material in different forms. During the 1920s, she averaged two books a year. Outside her light-hearted or her fantastical vein she is sometimes sentimental, but her remarkable portraits of battered, gallant old women are a positive feature in several different genres.