Mary Noel Streatfeild called herself a misfit in the vicarage family of her birth. In more than eighty children's and adults' books, however, she often drew on an imaginative, rebellious girlhood. Born in the day before Christmas 1895 to William and Janet Venn Streatfeild in Amberly, Sussex, Noel was the second daughter in a family of five daughters and a son. She built a life as a children's writer after careers on stage and as a novelist for adults, and moved from writing fiction to radio scripts and historical works. In explaining to the Streatfeild daughters that they would have to earn their own livings, her mother had remarked that Noel would be the one to surprise them all.

Expelled from her first school, St. Leonard's Ladies' College in St. Leonards-on-Sea, for resisting the authority of the headmistress, Streatfeild found outlets for her talents in parish pageants and in...