author
Ellinor Davenport Adams
1858–1915
A British writer and journalist from a notably literary family, she built her reputation on girls’ fiction told with an unusually close feel for a child’s point of view. Her stories sit at the meeting point of late Victorian moral fiction and lighter, more modern tales for young readers.
1 Audiobook
A Girl of To-day
by Ellinor Davenport Adams
About the author
Ellinor Davenport Adams was a British journalist and author, born in Putney in 1858 and active from the late 1870s into the early 1900s. She is best known for writing girls’ fiction, often shaping her stories from the child’s perspective in a way that gave them warmth and immediacy.
Writing ran through her family. Her father, William Henry Davenport Adams, was a prolific journalist and author, and her siblings were also involved in literature and drama. That background helps explain the ease with which she moved into literary work of her own, both as a writer and, later, as a publisher’s reader.
Much of her later fiction was published by Blackie and Son, and a number of her books have remained accessible through digital archives such as Project Gutenberg. She died in Putney on April 11, 1913, leaving behind a body of work that still offers a lively glimpse of children’s literature at the turn of the century.