Profile of Eleanor Farjeon on Famous Like Me

Eleanor Farjeon (February 13, 1881 – June 5, 1965) was an English author of stories and poems, chiefly for children. Her best known work is probably the hymn Morning Has Broken, written in 1931 for an old Gaelic tune, and highly popularized by the Cat Stevens recording in 1971.

Her father, Benjamin Farjeon, an author of popular melodramas, encouraged her writing from the age of five; at eighteen she wrote the libretto for an operetta, Floretta, to music by her older brother Harry, who later became a respected composer and teacher of music.

She had a wide range of friends with great literary talent including D. H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare and Robert Frost. For several years she had an intense friendship with the married poet Edward Thomas, which only ended with his death in April 1917 during the Battle of Arras. One of her most notable works, Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard, was written as a gift to him during his military service. She later published much of their correspondence, and gave an account of their relationship in Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years (1958).

In 1956 she won the Hans Christian Andersen Award for her contributions to children's literature.

Eleanor never married, but had a thirty-year relationship with George Earle, an English teacher. After his death in 1949, she had a long relationship with the actor Denys Blakelock, who wrote of it in the book Portrait of a Farjeon (1966).

Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard is available through the Project Gutenberg link below.

Her work is cited as an infuence by famous Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki.

Partial bibliography

• Pan-Worship and Other Poems (1908)
• The Soul of Kol Nikon (1914)
• Arthur Rackham: The Wizard at Home (1914) (non-fiction)
• Gypsy and Ginger (1920)
• Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard (1921)
• Faithful Jenny Dove and Other Tales (1925)
• Mighty Men: Achilles to Julius Caesar, Beowulf to Harold (1925)
• Nuts and May (1925)
• Faithful Jenny Dove and Other Tales (1925)
• Italian Peepshow (1926)
• Kaleidoscope (1928)
• The Tale of Tom Tiddler (1929)
• Tales from Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales Done in Prose (1930)
• The Old Nurse's Stocking Basket (1931)
• The Fair of St. James: A Fantasia (1932)
• Perkin the Pedlar (1932)
• Jim at the Corner and Other Stories (1934)
• A Nursery in the Nineties (1935) (Autobiography)
• Humming Bird: A Novel (1936)
• Ten Saints (1936)
• Martin Pippin in the Daisy Field (1937)
• The Wonders of Herodotus (1937)
• One Foot in Fairyland: Sixteen Tales (1938)
• Kings and Queens (1940) (Poetry, written with her brother, Herbert Farjeon)
• The New Book of Days (1941)
• The Glass Slipper (1944) (Play)
• Ariadne and the Bull (1945)
• The Silver Curlew (1949)(Play)
• The Little Bookroom (1955)
• The Glass Slipper (1955) (Novelization) -- I looked at the copyright on my copy
• Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years (1958) (non-fiction)

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