Name Elfrida Vipont Role Author | Died March 14, 1992 | |
Books The Elephant and the B, The Lark in the Morn, The Spring of the Year, George Fox and the Valia, Towards a high attic | ||
Elfrida Vipont was the pen name of Elfrida Vipont (Brown) Foulds (3 July 1902 – 14 March 1992), a British author of children's books. She was also a schoolteacher and a prominent member of the Society of Friends (Quakers) in England.
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Early life
Elfrida Vipont was born in Manchester in July 1902, the youngest daughter of Edward Vipont Brown (1863–1955), a general practitioner and Dorothy Brown (née Crowley) (1874–1968). Her parents were Quakers and she had two siblings.
She was educated at Manchester High School for Girls and The Mount School, York. She entered Manchester University to read History but withdrew to travel as a professional singer, freelance writer and lecturer.
In 1926, Vipont married R. Percy Foulds, a research technologist. They had four daughters and she started her writing career during their early years. She became a teacher and was Headmistress of the Quaker Evacuation School at Yealand Manor in Yealand Conyers, north Lancashire, during the Second World War.
Service to Quakers
Vipont was a lifelong member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). She served on the Meeting for Sufferings of London Yearly Meeting (an executive committee) from 1939 to 1985; from 1969 to 1974 she was its Clerk. She also served on the Friends Service Council, the Friends Education Council, the Library Committee and the Friends Historical Society Executive Committee. She was also a long-serving member of the Ackworth School Committee. She also served on the Committee that arranged for Quakers' annual gathering, "Yearly Meeting", and assisting in the revision of the "Book of Discipline".
Writing career
Vipont wrote "serious books" about Quakerism, some under her married name E. V. Foulds. One was her first published book, Quakerism: An International Way of Life (1930).
She used a man's pen name, Charles Vipont, to write adventure stories for boys (first in 1939); that was a common marketing device by Oxford University Press and other publishers of female authors. The Heir of Craigs (Oxford, 1955) is a historical novel set in Britain and North America late in the 17th century. Nigel Craig, the son of an aristocratic family, "escapes" on adventure with a cousin. Along with "a band of steadfast and resourceful Quakers", they are shipwrecked in the New World and they meet hostile natives.
"Elfrida Vipont" was also a pseudonym, of course. Under that name, she wrote about two dozen books for children (and other works), including short biographies of the authors Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Jane Austen (published by Hamish Hamilton, 1965 to 1977).
Her best-known books are The Lark in the Morn (1948) and The Lark on the Wing (1950), published by Oxford University Press. For the latter she won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject. The Lark books were five family stories following the musical career of Kit Haverard.
Vipont and the illustrator Raymond Briggs collaborated on a picture book for young children, The Elephant and the Bad Baby, published by Hamish Hamilton in 1969. Probably it is her most famous work; by a wide margin it is the one most widely held in WorldCat participating libraries. It features a baby who refuses to say please and goes romping through town on the back of an elephant while being chased by various townspeople. The Elephant and the Bad Baby is a "cumulative story" with a "poetic feel", a common effect drawn from the picture-book format of the text.
A number of her books were published by Gazelle Books and Reindeer Books, Hamish Hamilton's imprints for younger children.
Later life
She lived in the small Lancashire village of Yealand Conyers, where she was an active participant in community affairs.
Legacy
Vipont's personal papers are at the John Rylands University Library of Manchester.