Eleanor Stuart Childs (June 2, 1872 — April 27, 1952), who often used the pen-nameEleanor Stuart, was an American novelist and short story writer, who lived for a time inZanzibar.

Eleanor Stuart Patterson was born inEast 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 theAgnes Irwin School in Philadelphia.^[3]

Patterson was writing for magazines by age 16. Her short stories appeared inHarper's Magazine,Scribner's Magazine, andMcClure's Magazine.^[4] She also wrote essays, forNational Geographic about Zanzibar, where she lived for several years with her husband and young son,^[5] and for theBoston Evening Transcript aboutTheodore Roosevelt's trip to Africa.^[6]

TheNew York Times reviewedStonepastures as "a most masculine book, so grim and hard and adamantine" in its depiction of life in a Pennsylvania mining town.^[7] Another reviewer calledStonepastures 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.

Novels

• Stonepastures (1895)^[14]
• Averages: A Story of New York (1899)^[15]
• The Postscript (1908)^[16]
• The Romance of Ali (1913)^[17]

• Eleanor Stuart Childs atFind a Grave

• 1872 births
• 1952 deaths
• 19th-century American women writers
• Agnes Irwin School alumni
• 20th-century American women writers
• Writers from East Orange, New Jersey
• American women novelists

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata