Gertrude Minnie Faulding (1875 – 26 December 1961)[1] was an English children's writer and novelist born in London. She collaborated with Lucy Hanson Dale, a writer of history textbooks, on "two novels of romance and marriage with unusually independent heroines".[2]
London-born Gertrude Minnie Faulding was schooled in Switzerland and Germany, and then read modern languages atSomerville College, Oxford. She later worked as a language coach alongside her writing.[3] Little else is known of her private life.
Faulding had two children's books of illustrated fantasies published:Old Man's Beard and Other Tales[4] and a book of verse entitledNature Children. A Flower Book for Little Folks.[5][6]
She followed these withFairies (Fellowship Books, 1913), a short study of magicality in such tales, which was reprinted byDodo Press (London, 2009). In it she put forward the idea that "belief [infairies] is with most of us like a little plant, open to the morning sun, shivering gaily in the winds of life; scorched some times, and sometimes almost uprooted and vanishing away; yet ready always to blossom again at the stirring of ecstasy or the breath of an enchanted air."
Faulding's two novels were co-written with another Somerville graduate, Lucy Dale.[7]Time's Wallet (1913)[8] consists of letters between Somerville graduates who are working in theEast End of London. One of them breaks off her engagement rather than ceasing to think for herself.Merely Players (1917)[9] follows an unconventional playwright through the break-up of her marriage to a civil servant. The protagonists in both can be seen as unusually independent heroines.[2][10][6]