Elinor Mordaunt

author

Elinor Mordaunt

1876–1942

An adventurous early-20th-century novelist and travel writer, she drew on hard-won experience to fill her fiction with movement, danger, and faraway settings. Her life took her from England to Mauritius and Australia before writing became her main livelihood.

1 Audiobook

On the Wallaby Through Victoria

by Elinor Mordaunt

About the author

Born Evelyn May Clowes in Nottinghamshire, she later wrote under the name Elinor Mordaunt. Reliable biographical sources describe her as an English-born author and traveller whose early life included time in Gloucestershire and the Cotswolds before a period in Mauritius, where she married Maurice Wiehe.

After illness and personal hardship, she went on to Australia, supporting herself through a wide range of practical work while continuing to write. Her first novel, The Garden of Contentment, appeared in 1902, and over time writing became her chief profession.

From the 1910s onward she published mainly as Elinor Mordaunt and built a career as a novelist, short-story writer, and travel writer. Her books often reflect the reach of her own life and journeys, which helped give her work an energetic, worldly feel.