ELSIE JEANETTE OXENHAM including THE ABBEY GIRLS SERIES BRIEF BIOGRAPHY | ALL Titles | READING ORDER | MAIN EJO ENTRY SITE Join our COLLECTING BOOKS and MAGAZINES FACEBOOK GROUP . Updated 17th August, 2014.

A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
Elsie Jeanette Dunkerley was born at Southport, England in 1880, to Margery Anderson and William Arthur Dunkerley, a novelist in his own right but whose works (penned under the pseudonym 'John Oxenham') are now overshadowed by those of his eldest daughter. Elsie had three sisters - Marjorie (or 'Maida'), Theodora and Erica, and two brothers, - Roderic and Hugo. The family in the first years of this century was living quite comfortably on William's proceeds from his mainly devotional writings in Bedfords Park, Ealing, West London. Little is known about Elsie's early life. Authors attempting to fill in the details have had to rely on the dedications in her books, as admitted by Rosemary Auchmuty in her useful paperback on girls' fiction, 'A World of Girls'.

Elsie's first book, 'Goblin Island’, was set in Scotland. Her mother was Scottish and the family spent many holidays north of the border. The book concerned an unmarried female writer who served as her father-writer's secretary and is thought to have been partly biographical. "Goblin Island' was so successful that Elsie decided to become a full-time author. Both she and her sister Erica adopted her father's pen name. Unlike most writers who stick to one publisher, Elsie used 17 different ones throughout her lifetime; quite possibly more than any other English children's author.

Elsie was a keen member of the English Folk Dance Society and used her experiences to form her fictitious 'Hamlet Club' who held an annual crowning of a May Queen at their dance meetings. The Club was later to become the central theme of the "Abbey" series which was by far Elsie’s most popular series of books. She attended the EFDS vacation schools at Cheltenham and Chelsea. The family moved to Worthing in 1922 by which time Elsie had become a 'Guardian' in the American Camp Fire Movement, another subject which often came up in her stories. She was a keen naturalist, with a love of animals (all the cats in her stories reflected ones she'd met in real life), music and dancing.

The Oxenham family was very close, a point quite obvious to readers of the biography on Elsie's father, authored by her sister, Erica - and also to Elsie's readers with a number of books being dedicated to members of her family.Elsie Oxenham passed away in a Worthing nursing home, in January 1960.

The appeal of these books and most of the schoolgirl series of the time was the gradual development of the characters and their lives. Unlike many Schoolboy series where the characters stay much the same age through several or dozens of books, the girls in these series grow up. The Abbey series starts with a group of girls aged 14-17years old and ends with their children being about this age. The characters became friends to the readers and to find out what happened next always held and still does hold immense appeal.

The Abbey series (including main connecting stories) contains 45 books, of these only 22 are fairly easy to locate & 15 or so of the remainder are almost impossible to find in Australia. Occasional copies turn up but these are few and far between.

LIST of ALL books by EJO in alphabetical order
(omitting "a" or "the" at the start of the title).

Not included in the above list are the books which form part of another book, as follows:
GIRLS OF SQUIRREL HOUSE, GIRLS OF ROCKLANDS SCHOOL, SECOND TERM AT ROCKLANDS SCHOOL, THIRD TERM AT ROCKLANDS SCHOOL and CALL OF THE ABBEY.

ABBEY BOOKS IN READING ORDER

* Not set at the Abbey but really part of the series,
**Connectors (stories about characters that later appear in Abbey books)

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