Elinor Lyon

Background

Lyon was born in Guisborough, Yorkshire, and educated privately, and then at St George's School, Edinburgh and Headington School, Oxford (1934–38). She was strongly aware of her Scottish roots. Her father was P. H. B. Lyon. After a period in Switzerland, she returned to Oxford to read English at Lady Margaret Hall just as World War II began. She completed four terms, but then joined the WRNS because "with many...friends being killed, I couldn't stay there reading Milton." She served two-and-half years as a radar operator.

Elinor was the inspiration for many of John Gillespie Magee, Jr.'s poems. John had met Elinor while attending Rugby School, and remained close friends with Elinor and her family until his death in December 1941.

Her father was headmaster at Rugby School; she met her future husband Peter Wright there when he was a temporary classics and English teacher. They became engaged in 1943. He returned to teaching when he was demobbed in 1946, and although Lyon's father retired in 1948 they remained at Rugby until 1975, when they retired to Harlech. Gwynedd. They had four children and now have twelve grandchildren.

Elinor Lyon died at Harlech on 28 May 2008, her husband having died of a stroke twelve years previously.

Books

From 1948 to 1976 Lyon wrote over twenty books for children, which had some success on both sides of the Atlantic. She found they "came much more easily" than writing for adults and believes her inspiration came from "omnivorous reading".

Lyon began The House in Hiding, for example, after reading Swallows and Amazons, because she disliked the characters within it (they were too good at everything). In response, the children in The House in Hiding get things wrong, but still manage to succeed eventually. The development was pinpointed in an obituary by Julia Eccleshare: "Lyon's adventures, with their strong girls and sensitive boys and shared leadership between the sexes, were firmly within the Arthur Ransome tradition, yet felt more modern, more thoughtful about how children's behaviour is affected by what they experience, especially the way they are treated by adults. Within the adventures, her intention was to show the themes that she felt children cared about: justice, freedom and compassion." The main characters, Ian and Sovra (pronounced with a long "o", from sóbhrach, meaning primrose in Gaelic), son and daughter of a local doctor, appear in a series of stories recognisably set in the Ardnish Peninsula, near Arisaig, Scotland.

As the children explain to a new friend in We Daren't Go A'Hunting, "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." The third in the series, Run Away Home, is a darker story of an orphan, Cathie, on a reckless search for her past. As with the bossy town girl Ann in the first two books, Cathie is at once a focus and a foil for the doings of the bold and humane Ian and Sovra. Determination to show that girls can be as resourceful and adventurous as boys pervades Lyon's books, not excluding the first, Hilary's Island (1948).

Among the admirers of Lyon's books was Walter de la Mare. He stated in a dust-jacket endorsement of Wishing Water Gate that "a deal of close thinking must have gone into its bright-vivid and complex plot and its lively English; I enjoyed every page." More recently, she was named by the US children's writer Lizzie K. Foley as a favourite author. However, Lyon as a children's novelist escaped almost all critical attention during her thirty-year writing career. As one later scholar remarked, "Elinor Lyon, whose series of novels about Ian and Sovra – set in the Scottish Highlands – have something of the character of William Mayne's early fiction, is not mentioned in any of the standard works." Still, the dust jacket of the 1967 American edition of Echo Valley quotes The Times Literary Supplement as calling her "a writer to remember and look for."

Lyon ceased to write in 1975, but reprints of several titles appeared in the 1980s, and four were reissued from 2006 onwards by an Edinburgh publisher. Three of these, The House in Hiding, We Daren't Go A'Hunting and Dragon Castle are currently available.