Amélie Claire Leroy


Amélie Claire Leroy was an English writer, who wrote over 60 works often using the pseudonym Esmè Stuart.

Life

Leroy lived for a while with the novelist Anna Rachel Bramston and they adopted a daughter called Juliette. Bramston, the daughter of John Bramston, founded Winchester High School, a boarding school for girls, in 1884; the school is now called St Swithun's School.
In 1903, Leroy wrote a letter to the Secretary of The Rhodes Trust asking to admit women to the Rhodes Scholarship. Her request was refused.

Literature

Leroy wrote seven dozen novels, many of them aimed at young women, in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. One of her best known series, the Harum Scarum novels, features the wild Australian schoolgirl Antonia "Toney" Whitburn, forced to live with her aristocratic aunt and uncle in England.