Name Eden Phillpotts Role Author | Children Adelaide Ross Plays The Farmer's Wife | |
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Died December 29, 1960, Broadclyst, United Kingdom Movies The Forest on the Hill, The Mother of Dartmoor Books The Red Redmaynes, The Grey Room, The Flint Heart, Children of the Mist, A dish of apples Similar People Arnold Bennett, Frank Brangwyn, Cecil Hepworth, George Loane Tucker | ||
The flint heart full audiobook by eden phillpotts by children s myths fiction
Eden Phillpotts (4 November 1862 – 29 December 1960) was an English author, poet and dramatist. He was born in Mount Abu, British India, educated in Plymouth, Devon, and worked as an insurance officer for 10 years before studying for the stage and eventually becoming a writer.
Contents
- The flint heart full audiobook by eden phillpotts by children s myths fiction
- Life and character
- Writings
- Quality of writing
- Omnibus
- References
He co-wrote several plays with his daughter Adelaide Phillpotts, The Farmer's Wife (1924) and Yellow Sands (1926); she later claimed their relationship was incestuous. Eden is best known as the author of many novels, plays and poems about Dartmoor. His Dartmoor cycle of 18 novels and two volumes of short stories still has many avid readers despite the fact that many titles are out of print.
Life and character
Phillpotts was for many years the President of the Dartmoor Preservation Association and cared passionately about the conservation of Dartmoor. He was also an agnostic and a supporter of the Rationalist Press Association.
Phillpotts was a friend of Agatha Christie, who was an admirer of his work and a regular visitor to his home. Jorge Luis Borges was another admirer. Borges mentioned him numerous times, wrote at least two reviews of his novels, and included him in his "Personal Library", a collection of works selected to reflect his personal literary preferences.
Philpotts appears to have had a long incestuous relationship with his daughter Adelaide. In a 1976 interview for a book about her father, Adelaide describes an incestuous relationship with him that she says lasted from the age of five or six until her early thirties, when he remarried. When she herself finally married at the age of 55 her father never forgave her, and never communicated with her again. Eden Phillpotts died in Broadclyst.
Writings
Phillpotts wrote a great many books with a Dartmoor setting. One of his novels, Widecombe Fair, inspired by an annual fair at the village of Widecombe-in-the-Moor, provided the scenario for his comic play The Farmer's Wife. It went on to become a silent movie of the same name, directed by Alfred Hitchcock and filmed in 1927. (The cast included Jameson Thomas, Lillian Hall-Davis, Gordon Harker and Gibb McLaughlin.)
Philpotts also wrote a series of novels, each set against the background of a different trade or industry. Titles include: Brunel's Tower (a pottery) and Storm in a Teacup (hand-papermaking). Among his other works is The Grey Room, the plot of which is centered on a haunted room in an English manor house. He also wrote a number of other mystery novels, both under his own name and the pseudonym Harrington Hext. These include: The Thing at Their Heels, The Red Redmaynes, The Monster, The Clue from the Stars, and The Captain's Curio. The Human Boy was a collection of schoolboy stories in the same genre as Rudyard Kipling's Stalky & Co., though different in mood and style. Late in his long writing career he wrote a few books of interest to science fiction and fantasy readers, the most noteworthy being Saurus, which involves an alien reptilian observing human life.
Quality of writing
Eric Partridge praised the immediacy and impact of his dialect writing.