Evelyn Everett-Green

Evelyn Ward Everett-Green (17 November 1856, London – 23 April 1932, Funchal) was an English novelist who started her writing career with improving and pious stories for children, and later wrote historical fiction for older girls, and then adult romantic fiction. She wrote about 350 books: more than 200 under her own name, and others using the pen-names H. F. E., Cecil Adair, E. Ward, or Evelyn Dare.

Early life and work

Her mother was the historian Mary Anne Everett Green and her father George Pycock Green was an artist. The family were Methodists.

During a year at Bedford College, London (1872–1873), Everett-Green wrote her first novel, and she continued to write while studying at the London Academy of Music. Her brother's death in 1876 ended her plans to go to India with him, and she occupied herself with good works, including Sunday School teaching and nursing.

Later life and work

In 1880 her first published work, Tom Tempest's Victory, appeared. Though it was soon followed by more, she found writing at home difficult, and town winters did not suit her health. In 1883 she went to live outside London with Catherine Mainwaring Sladen, and in the 1890s and early 1900s they had homes in Albury, Surrey. In 1911 they moved abroad and eventually settled in Madeira.

During her time in Albury she wrote numerous historical novels, and fewer moral tales for the Religious Tract Society. Her novel about Joan of Arc, Called of Her Country (1903), later re-published as A Heroine of France, presents Joan as a feminine "Angelic Maid" in white armour whose inspiring adventures were undertaken in a dutiful spirit.

Much of Everett-Green's fiction was aimed at girls, but she also wrote boys' adventure stories, like A Gordon Highlander (1901).

After moving abroad she wrote romantic novels for adults, often using the pseudonym Cecil Adair.

Sources

• Oxford Companion to Edwardian Fiction 1900-14: New Voices in the Age of Uncertainty, ed.Kemp, Mitchell, Trotter (OUP 1997)
• Hilary Clare, in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
• Penny Brown, Reinventing the Maid: images of Joan of Arc in French and English children's literature, in The Presence of the Past in Children's Literature ed. Ann Lawson Lucas (Praeger 2003)

Further reading

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Evelyn Everett-Green

• Kimberley Reynolds, Girls Only?: gender and popular children's fiction in Britain, 1880-1910 (Harvester Wheatsheaf 1990)
• Pictures from French and Italian translations of Drifted ashore or A Child without a Name

External links

• Works by Evelyn Everett-Green at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Evelyn Everett-Green at Internet Archive
• A Heroine of France
• In the Wars of the Roses
• True Stories of Girl Heroines
• The Secret Chamber at Chad