Eleanor Smith (writer)

Lady Eleanor Furneaux Smith

Lady Eleanor Furneaux Smith (1902, Birkenhead – 1945) was an active member of the Bright Young Things and an English writer.

Life

Smith was the eldest child of the politician F. E. Smith's three children. She went to Miss Douglas's school at Queen's Gate. At Queen's Gate she met Lady Alannah Harper and Zita Jungman and together they became early members of what the British press would call the "Bright Young Things".[1]

Smith worked as a society reporter and cinema reviewer for a while, then as a publicist for circus companies. In the latter role she travelled widely, and gained inspiration for her third career, writing popular novels and short stories which often provided the basis for the 'Gainsborough melodramas' of the period. These stories often had a romanticised historical or Gypsy setting, based on her own research into Romany culture (she believed one of her paternal great-grandmothers to have been a Gypsy).[2] Smith also wrote ghost stories; many of them were collected in her book Satan's Circus (1932).[2] Smith was a supporter of the Conservative Party.[2]

Novels

Year Novel Film adaptation
Red Wagon Red Wagon (1933)
Tzigane Gypsy (1937)
Ballerina The Men in Her Life (1941)
The Man in Grey The Man in Grey (1943)
Caravan Caravan (1946)

Notes

  1. ↑ D J Taylor (30 September 2010). Bright Young People: The Rise and Fall of a Generation 1918-1940. Random House. pp. 24, 55. ISBN 978-1-4090-2063-9.
  2. 1 2 3 Richard Dalby, (editor) The Virago Book of Ghost Stories: The Twentieth Century: Volume Two.Virago, London, 1991. 1-85381-454-7 (p.318).


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