These books are in the form of PDFs. They are printable and searchable. They have been digitised by scanning nineteenth century or early twentieth century copies of the books. These original scans are also available in the Internet Archive. To make them more readable we have omitted the images, which can be seen, if desired, with the original scans in the Internet Archive. Books dated later than 1922 may not be viewed from within the USA.

Many books of the period up to 1922 were originally published in serial form, usually in weekly instalments. Such books might be put into book form for the first time several years after the author's death.

Emily Sarah Holt, 1836 to 1893.

There doesn't seem to be much information easily available about Emily Sarah Holt. She is not mentioned in "The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature". She wrote about fifty books, mainly for children, and published over a rather short period of her life. Most of her books could be classified as Historical Novels.

I have an impression from snatches I have read that she lived in a rather upper middle class part of London, which we would call today "South Kensington". It may be significant that she died in 1893 for there was a major flu epidemic that year, which lasted a couple of years after that.

Somebody wrote recently that second-hand copies of her books in good condition are in short supply because her readers, a hundred years ago and more, so much loved reading their copies that they "read them to bits". This may be a bookseller's hype, but there must be a grain of truth in it. It may well also be true of all the authors we present on, or in conjunction with, the Athelstane website.