Eleanor Farjeon at age eighteen. ca. 1899. Portrait by Paul Corder
Eleanor Farjeon at age eighteen. ca. 1899.
Portrait by Paul Corder
Eleanor Farjeon was born on 13 February 1881 in London,
England. Her father was Benjamin Leopold Farjeon, journalist, first manager of the Otago Daily Times, and
author of numerous books including one of the first novels to be printed in New Zealand, Shadows in the Snow (1866). The Farjeons were a talented family. The
eldest
son, Harry, was a teacher at the Royal Academy of Music; Joe and Herbert became writers. Eleanor had no formal education, but her father’s library of 8,000 books
provided a fertile field for learning.
When Benjamin Farjeon died in 1903, leaving no inheritance, Eleanor began writing to earn a living. She was twenty-two at the time. Among her earliest publications
is a volume of poems called Pan Worship, published in 1908, and Nursery Rhymes of London Town from 1916. Farjeon moved to Sussex the following year in
1917. There
she wrote one of her most notable books, Martin Pippin in the Apple-Orchard (1921), which established her reputation as an author.
Dust jacket for Oxford University Press edition of Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard (1952)
The 1930s and 1940s saw numerous collaborative efforts with her brother Herbert. The Two Banquets¸ an operetta, was written in 1936 and published as a
novelette in
1948. In 1944 the pair wrote a children’s play called The Glass Slipper, which was published as a full-length book in 1955. Eleanor’s skill as an author truly
blossomed in the 1950s with such finely crafted books as Silver-Sand and Snow (1951) and the collection of poems The Children’s Bells (1957).
[Dust jacket for Oxford University Press edition of Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard (1952)]
Farjeon was a prolific writer. Children’s verses, miscellanies, rhymed alphabets, songs and stories all poured forth from her pen. Her most successful works,
however, remain her children’s books. Eleanor Farjeon never married and had no children. She died on 5 June 1965 at Hampstead, London.
Eleanor Farjeon donated her family collection of books to the Dunedin Public Library in memory of her father in 1960. The collection numbers over 200 items written
by not only Eleanor Farjeon, but her father and brothers as well.
|
