Gertrude Minnie Faulding

Gertrude Minnie Faulding (1875 – 26 December 1961)[1] was an English children's writer and novelist born in London. She collaborated with Lucy Hanson Dale, a writer of history textbooks, on "two novels of romance and marriage with unusually independent heroines".[2]

Life

London-born Gertrude Minnie Faulding was schooled in Switzerland and Germany, and then read modern languages at Somerville College, Oxford. She later worked as a language coach alongside her writing.[3] Little else is known of her private life.

Works

Faulding had two children's books of illustrated fantasies published: Old Man's Beard and Other Tales[4] and a book of verse entitled Nature Children. A Flower Book for Little Folks.[5][6]

She followed these with Fairies (Fellowship Books, 1913), a short study of magicality in such tales, which was reprinted by Dodo Press (London, 2009). In it she put forward the idea that "belief [in fairies] is with most of us like a little plant, open to the morning sun, shivering gaily in the winds of life; scorched some times, and sometimes almost uprooted and vanishing away; yet ready always to blossom again at the stirring of ecstasy or the breath of an enchanted air."

Faulding's two novels were co-written with another Somerville graduate, Lucy Dale.[7] Time's Wallet (1913)[8] consists of letters between Somerville graduates who are working in the East End of London. One of them breaks off her engagement rather than ceasing to think for herself. Merely Players (1917)[9] follows an unconventional playwright through the break-up of her marriage to a civil servant. The protagonists in both can be seen as unusually independent heroines.[2][10][6]

References
  1. New General Catalog of Old Books and Authors. Retrieved 23 October 2018.
  2. Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy: The Feminist Companion to Literature in English. Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (Batsford: London, 1990), p. 359.
  3. Oxford Index. Retrieved 23 October 2018.
  4. Illustrated by Walter P. Starmer, 1877–1961. London: J. M. Dent & Co; New York: E. P. Dutton & Co, 1909.
  5. Illustrated by Eleanor S. March. London: Oxford University Press – Henry Frowde, 1911, reissued at least twice by Oxford University Press in 1911 and 1927.
  6. British Library. Retrieved 23 October 2018.
  7. Dale's works include The Principles of English Constitutional History (1902) and Landmarks of British History (1910). Hathi Trust Retrieved 23 October 2018.
  8. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1913.
  9. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1917.
  10. Author and Book. Retrieved 23 October 2018.
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