bio notes:
died: 10/26/1914
born as: Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith

L.T. Meade was the most prolific writer of girls' books in the nineteenth century. She established the girls' school story with A World of Girls (1886), but only 30 of the approximately 280 books she authored during her forty-year writing career are school stories. Meade wrote in a wide variety of other genres for both juvenile and adult audiences, including "street arab" tales, historical adventure stories, fantasies, domestic stories, robinsonnades (island survival tales, a genre established by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, 1719), nursing stories, detective tales, medical mystery novels, and crime stories. Between 1887 and 1893 she also edited the girls' magazine Atalanta. - Mavis Reimer, British Children's Writers, 1880-1914. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994.