The January Baby

Prolific and much-loved author of Ballet Shoes, among many other books, Noel Streatfeild was born in 1895, a daughter of the Bishop of Lewes and a great-granddaughter of the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry. After a rebellious childhood, she worked in a wartime munitions factory before going to RADA and becoming an actress for ten years. Her first six novels were for adults, but she was persuaded to re-work The Whicharts (1931) as a novel for children, and wrote many more after that. Streatfeild, who never married, led a busy London literary life and, by the time she died in 1986, had written over eighty books as well as three volumes of autobiography.