Elinor Lyon facts for kids

Elinor Bruce Lyon (born August 17, 1921 – died May 28, 2008) was an English writer who wrote many books for children. She had strong Scottish family roots. Many of her stories take place along the beautiful Highland coast. Her books are known for having "strong girls and sensitive boys" who often share leadership roles.

About Elinor Lyon

Elinor Lyon was born in Guisborough, a town in Yorkshire, England. She was taught at home for a while, then went to schools in Edinburgh and Oxford. She always felt a strong connection to her Scottish heritage. Her father, P. H. B. Lyon, was a poet and a headmaster.

After spending some time in Switzerland, Elinor returned to Oxford to study English. This was just as World War II was starting. She studied for a few terms, but then decided to join the WRNS. She felt she couldn't just keep reading books when so many of her friends were fighting. She worked for two and a half years as a radar operator, helping to detect enemy planes.

Elinor was a close friend of the American poet and pilot, John Gillespie Magee Jr.. He even wrote some poems inspired by her. They stayed good friends until he sadly passed away in 1941.

Elinor's father was the headmaster at Rugby School for many years. It was there that Elinor met her future husband, Peter Wright. He was a teacher at the school. They got engaged in 1943. After the war, Peter went back to teaching. Even after Elinor's father retired, they stayed at Rugby until 1975. Then, they moved to Harlech, a town in Gwynedd, Wales.

Elinor loved Scotland very much. This love came from holidays she spent there as a child. She often took her own children on holidays to remote Scottish houses. These places sometimes didn't even have running water or electricity! These adventures inspired many of her books.

Elinor Lyon passed away in Harlech on May 28, 2008. Her husband had died twelve years earlier. She left behind two sons, two daughters, and twelve grandchildren.

Elinor Lyon's Books

Between 1948 and 1976, Elinor Lyon wrote over twenty books for children. Her books were quite popular in both the UK and the US. She found writing for children much easier than writing for adults. She believed her ideas came from reading lots of different books.

For example, Elinor started writing The House in Hiding after reading Swallows and Amazons. She didn't like that the characters in that book were always perfect. So, in her book, the children often make mistakes, but they still manage to succeed in the end. A writer named Julia Eccleshare noted that Elinor's adventure stories were like those of Arthur Ransome, but they felt more modern. They thought about how children's experiences, especially how adults treated them, affected their behavior.

Elinor wanted to show themes that children cared about in her adventures. These included justice, freedom, and kindness. Her main characters, Ian and Sovra, are a brother and sister. Sovra's name is pronounced with a long "o" and means "primrose" in Gaelic. They are the children of a local doctor. Their stories are often set in the real-life Ardnish Peninsula, near Arisaig and Mallaig in Scotland.

Elinor Lyon's 2005 letter

In a letter from June 24, 2005, Elinor Lyon explained how she used real places in her books: I used the area around Arisaig and Mallaig for my Ian and Sovra books, though I altered quite a lot of things. Kinlochmore = Fort William Loch Fionn = Loch Nan Uamh Kilcorrie and Melvick = a mixture of Arisaig and Mallaig. Fionnard = Ardnish where there is a deserted village, but not in the right place. The railway and the viaduct are real, but Loch-head, Kindrachill and Camas Ban are all imaginary, and I've taken liberties with the landscape – mountains, white sand mountain roads etc.

In the book We Daren't Go A'Hunting, the children tell a new friend, "Stay with us and you won't be bored. You may be seasick or ship-wrecked or drowned or lost or burned or killed by falling over a cliff, but you won't be bored." This shows how exciting their adventures were!

The third book in the series, Run Away Home, is a more serious story. It's about an orphan girl named Cathie who is looking for her past. Cathie also becomes the main character in Cathie Runs Wild, the fifth book. She is a fostered child who feels unsure of herself, even with Ian and Sovra helping her. Elinor Lyon's books always showed that girls could be just as clever and brave as boys. This was true even in her very first book, Hilary's Island (1948).

Famous poet Walter de la Mare was a fan of Elinor Lyon's books. He once said about Wishing Water Gate that it had a "bright-vivid and complex plot and its lively English." He added, "I enjoyed every page." More recently, American children's writer Lizzie K. Foley named Elinor Lyon as one of her favorite authors.

Even though her books were enjoyed, Elinor Lyon didn't get much attention from critics during her 30 years of writing. One expert later noted that Elinor Lyon, whose books about Ian and Sovra were set in the Scottish Highlands, was not mentioned in many important books about children's literature. However, a 1967 American edition of Echo Valley quoted The Times Literary Supplement as calling her "a writer to remember and look for."

Elinor Lyon stopped writing in 1975. But some of her books were reprinted in the 1980s. Four more were reissued starting in 2006 by an Edinburgh publisher called Fidra Books.

Elinor Lyon's publisher until 1962 was Hodder & Stoughton. Later books came from another Hodder company, the Brockhampton Press. Some of her books were also published in the US by Follett of Chicago in the 1960s. The biography of her father was published privately. As mentioned, some of her books were reissued by Fidra Books in the 2000s. Some of her titles were even translated into German, Spanish, Italian, Swedish, and Danish.