Hesba Stretton

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Standard Name: Stretton, Hesba
Birth Name: Sarah Smith
Pseudonym: Hesba Stretton
HS was a prolific writer, who during the later nineteenth century produced nearly sixty works of fiction for children and adults, several works of non-fiction, and numerous contributions to a variety of different periodicals. Renowned for her bestselling evangelical children's stories, she typically chose to write about social reform in a style that has been described as pathetic simplicity.
Black and white photograph of Hesba Stretton, seated, with her arm resting on the ornately tasseled arm of her chair. She is plainly dressed in a floor-length dark dress, with buttons up the front and long puff sleeves. Her dark hair is parted in the centre and pulled back tightly; her gaze is straight ahead.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Patricia Beer
She then went on to attend a council school. Until about the age of ten her imaginative life was coloured by the children's books of Hesba Stretton , Mrs O. F. Walton , and Amy Le Feuvre
Friends, Associates Ellen Wood
As she began to establish herself as a writer, EW became a friend of her fellow authors Anna Maria Hall , Julia Kavanagh , and Mary Howitt . The latter wrote her a complimentary letter...
Intertextuality and Influence E. Nesbit
In this work (influenced, says Julia Briggs, by the work of Hesba Stretton ) the children find the lost treasure that will enable Arden Castle (a symbol of English history) to be restored.
Briggs takes...
Material Conditions of Writing Mary Angela Dickens
The journal All the Year Round, founded by MAD 's grandfather and then edited by her father, was one of the first and most significant platforms for her short stories and serialized novels. Other...
Textual Production Ellen Wood
EW purchased the magazine from Alexander Strahan , who had decided to sell following the backlash prompted by Charles Reade 's sexually frank novel Griffith Gaunt. Her position as editor of a family magazine...
Textual Production Charles Dickens
Other contributions were appeared from Mrs Alexander , Elizabeth Barrett Browning , Edward Bulwer-Lytton , Caroline Chisholm (later parodied by CD ), Wilkie Collins , Dinah Mulock and Georgiana Craik , Amelia B. Edwards ,...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Sarah Tytler
Clearly delighted with the opportunity to mix in literary circles, ST recorded her personal observations of these authors in Men and Women Met by the Way, the final 100-page-long section of her family autobiography...

Timeline

5 January 1907
Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts (who died of bronchitis on 30 December 1906) became the last person laid to rest at Westminster Abbey.