The Floodmakers

Elinor Bruce Lyon (17 August 1921 - 28 May 2008) was an English children's author. From 1948 to 1976 Lyon wrote over twenty books for children, which had some success on both sides of the Atlantic. Lyon began The House in Hiding, for example, after reading Swallows and Amazons, because she disliked the characters within it (they were too good at everything).[9] In response, the children in The House in Hiding get things wrong, but still manage to succeed eventually. The development was pinpointed in an obituary by Julia Eccleshare: "Lyon's adventures, with their strong girls and sensitive boys and shared leadership between the sexes, were firmly within the Arthur Ransome tradition, yet felt more modern, more thoughtful about how children's behaviour is affected by what they experience, especially the way they are treated by adults. Within the adventures, her intention was to show the themes that she felt children cared about: justice, freedom and compassion."[10] The main characters, Ian and Sovra (pronounced with a long "o",[11] from sobhrach, meaning primrose in Gaelic), son and daughter of a local doctor, appear in a series of stories recognizably set in the Ardnish Peninsula, near Arisaig, Scotland. However, Lyon as a children's novelist escaped almost all critical attention during her thirty-year writing career. As one later scholar remarked, "Elinor Lyon, whose series of novels about Ian and Sovra - set in the Scottish Highlands - have something of the character of William Mayne's early fiction, is not mentioned in any of the standard works."[15] Still, the dust jacket of the 1967 American edition of Echo Valley quotes The Times Literary Supplement as calling her "a writer to remember and look for."