Eleanor Stuart Childs
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Eleanor Stuart Childs (June 2, 1872 — April 27, 1952), who often used the pen-name Eleanor Stuart, was an American novelist and short story writer, who lived for a time in Zanzibar.
Eleanor Stuart Patterson was born in East Orange, New Jersey, the daughter of Edward Patterson and Isabel Liddon Coxe Patterson. Her father was a judge, and president of the Bar Association of the City of New York.[1][2] She attended the Agnes Irwin School in Philadelphia.[3]
Patterson was writing for magazines by age 16. Her short stories appeared in Harper's Magazine, Scribner's Magazine, and McClure's Magazine.[4] She also wrote essays, for National Geographic about Zanzibar, where she lived for several years with her husband and young son,[5] and for the Boston Evening Transcript about Theodore Roosevelt's trip to Africa.[6]
The New York Times reviewed Stonepastures as "a most masculine book, so grim and hard and adamantine" in its depiction of life in a Pennsylvania mining town.[7] Another reviewer called Stonepastures a "homegrown novelette, concise, vivid, and vigorous...unusually satisfactory in itself, and rich in its promise for the writer's purpose."[8]
In 1903, she married an ivory importer,[9] Harris Robbins Childs.[10] Their only child, Edward Patterson Childs, was born in Zanzibar in 1904.[11] She was widowed in 1922,[12] in the same year her husband's company went bankrupt and was investigated for irregularities.[13] She died in 1952, aged 79 years.
