Elaine Horseman


Elaine Horseman née Hall was a British author of three children's books, which centre on five children in an old victorian house and their experiences with a book of magic spells. Horseman's first novel Hubble's Bubble was published first in England and in Germany, France, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Spain and Portugal.

Life

Elaine Hall was born in 1925 in Lichfield, Staffordshire to Harold Hall, a Vicar Choral, and Olive E. Bowey. She was the second of nine children and "grew up in a house very like the Hubbles', in the Cathedral Close at Lichfield in Staffordshire". In 1950 she married Leslie A. Horseman, a computer applications engineer, with whom she moved to Bristol and had two sons: Stephen Thomas and Christopher Michael. She became qualified as a teacher at the University of Birmingham and worked as a primary school teacher from 1944, before she gave up teaching in 1962 in order to write.
Of the second Hubbles or Boffins Club book, the American journal Kirkus Reviews complemented the easy transitions between fantasy and reality and observed that the children "keep up a steady banter often pleasantly silly, frequently affected, and always very British."
Horseman died in Bristol, April 1999.

Works