author
Edith Serrell
Best known as the co-author of Deer Godchild, she helped tell a warm, unusual World War I story about a New York boy supporting an orphaned child in France. Very little biographical information seems to survive, which gives her work an added sense of period mystery.
1 Audiobook
Deer Godchild
by Marguerite Bernard, Edith Serrell
About the author
Edith Serrell is a little-documented early 20th-century writer whose name is most clearly connected with Deer Godchild, a book published in 1918 and 1919 with Marguerite Bernard as co-author. Library and archive records consistently credit her as a joint author of the book.
Deer Godchild was published for the Fatherless Children of France and presents the letters of a twelve-year-old American boy determined to support a French war orphan. The surviving records suggest Serrell was not only associated with the book as a named author, but also wrote the introduction that frames its charitable purpose and hopeful tone.
Beyond that, confirmed personal details about her life are scarce in the sources available here. A university special-collections note also mentions an Edith Serrell in a family collection tied to Dobbs Ferry, New York, but without enough evidence to safely build a fuller life story from that alone.