Margaret Biggs (born 9 July 1929, Orpington, Kent) is a popular and collectible exponent of the girls' School story. She is best known for her Melling School series of books, first published by Blackie in the 1950s. [1] The series is set at a weekly boarding school and is unusual in that it shows boarding school life and home life side by side. The interaction between girls and boys is also atypical of the genre at that time. The Melling series was republished by Girls Gone By Publishers in the 2000s and the reprints, whilst retaining the original text and artwork, have new introductions by Margaret Biggs, who is ‘taking great pleasure in the republication of her books’. Ms Biggs has also written two new volumes in the series, Kate at Melling, set twelve years after the earlier books, and Changes at Melling, which were published by Girls Gone By Publishers in 2008 and 2009 respectively. [2]
Margaret Biggs moved to Hertfordshire in 1935 where she was educated at Queen Elizabeth's School for Girls in Barnet. After leaving school in 1946, Biggs obtained employment in the editorial department of Evans Brothers publishers where she met Jacqueline Blairman with whom she co-wrote her first school story. Prior to that her published writing had consisted of short stories and magazine articles.
Margaret Biggs married David Cadney in 1953. They have three children.
Melling series
Other titles
Short stories
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell was an American novelist and journalist. Mitchell wrote only one novel that was published during her lifetime, the American Civil War-era novel Gone with the Wind, for which she won the National Book Award for Fiction for Most Distinguished Novel of 1936 and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1937. Long after her death, a collection of Mitchell's girlhood writings and a novella she wrote as a teenager, titled Lost Laysen, were published. A collection of newspaper articles written by Mitchell for The Atlanta Journal was republished in book form.
The Chalet School is a series of 58 school story novels by Elinor M. Brent-Dyer, initially published between 1925 and 1970. The fictional school was initially located in the Austrian Tyrol, before it was moved to Guernsey in 1939 following the rise to power of the Nazi Party, and again to Herefordshire following the Nazi invasion of the Channel Islands. It later moved to a fictional island off the coast of Wales, and finally to Switzerland.
Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter is a series of urban fantasy novels, short stories, and comic books by Laurell K. Hamilton. The books have sold more than six million copies; many have made The New York Times Best Seller list.
Antonia Forest was the pseudonym of Patricia Giulia Caulfield Kate Rubinstein, an English writer. She wrote 13 books for children, published between 1948 and 1982. Her 10 best-known works concern the doings of the fictional Marlow family. Forest also wrote two historical novels about the Marlows' Elizabethan ancestors.
Dame Jacqueline Wilson is an English novelist known for her popular children's literature. Her novels have been notable for tackling realistic topics such as adoption and divorce without alienating her large readership. Since her debut novel in 1969, Wilson has written over 100 books.
Meggin Patricia Cabot is an American novelist. She has written and published over 50 novels of young adult and adult fiction and is best known for her young adult series The Princess Diaries, which was later adapted by Walt Disney Pictures into two feature films. Cabot has been the recipient of numerous book awards, including the New York Public Library Books for the Teen Age, the American Library Association Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, the Tennessee Volunteer State TASL Book Award, the Book Sense Pick, the Evergreen Young Adult Book Award, the IRA/CBC Young Adult Choice, and many others. She has also had number-one New York Times bestsellers, and more than 25 million copies of her books are in print across the world.
Jacqueline Pearce was a British film and television actress. She was best known for her portrayal of the principal villain Servalan in the British science fiction TV series Blake's 7 (1978–1981), a performance which her obituarist in The Times wrote produced "a sexual awakening for a generation of sci-fi fans".
Trebizon is a series of school story novels by Anne Digby set in a fictional school of that name. The fourteen novels were published between 1978 and 1994 and the first ten books were reprinted in 2016 and 2017. Like Enid Blyton's earlier creation, Malory Towers, Trebizon is in Cornwall.
Anne Digby is a prolific British children's writer best known for the Trebizon series published between 1978 and 1994. The name is a pen name.
Angela Brazil was one of the first British writers of "modern schoolgirls' stories", written from the characters' point of view and intended primarily as entertainment rather than moral instruction. In the first half of the 20th century she published nearly 50 books of girls' fiction, the vast majority being boarding school stories. She also published numerous short stories in magazines.
Dorita Fairlie Bruce was a Scottish children's author who wrote the popular Dimsie series of books published between 1921 and 1941. Her books were second in popularity only to Angela Brazil's during the 1920s and 1930s. The Dimsie books alone had sold half a million hardback copies by 1947.
Dimsie Goes To School is the first of the Dimsie books by author Dorita Fairlie Bruce. It was first published in 1921 under the title The Senior Prefect and changed in 1925 to Dimsie Goes To School. The book was illustrated by Wal Paget.
Phyllis Matthewman , British writer of children's books, mostly boarding school stories, and adult fiction.
Clare Mallory is the pen name under which Winifred Constance McQuilkan Hall wrote ten children's books published between 1947 and 1951.
Josephine Elder was the pen name of Olive Gwendoline Potter, an English writer of children's literature who published ten school stories between 1924 and 1940 as well as numerous short stories for annuals. She is widely regarded as one of the best writers of the girls' school story. Her most acclaimed book is the 1929 title, Evelyn Finds Herself. Twenty years later Clare Mallory, another leading exponent of the girls' school story, dedicated one of her own books, Juliet Overseas to Josephine Elder, describing her as "Author of the best girls' school story I know: Evelyn Finds Herself."
Girls Gone By Publishers is a publishing company run by Clarissa Cridland and Ann Mackie-Hunter and is based in Coleford, Somerset. They re-publish new editions of some of the most popular girls' fiction titles from the twentieth century.
Edith Elise Cadogan Cowper was a prolific and popular author of adventure stories for girls. She married yachtsman and fellow writer Frank Cowper and had eight children by him before the marriage fell apart.
Ellinor Davenport Adams was a British journalist and writer. She wrote mainly girls’ fiction, and told her stories from the child's perspective.
Mary Alice Faid, was a British writer of children's books, mostly religious fiction, and of adult fiction.
Theodora Wilson Wilson was a British writer and pacifist. She was a founding member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. Her "quaint" reputation as a writer changed when she published her 1916 science fiction novel The Last Weapon, A Vision, whose anti-war message led to its being banned.