E. M. Almedingen

E. M. Almedingen (born Marta Aleksandrovna Almedingen, also known as Martha Edith Almedingen or von Almedingen) (1898–1971) was a British novelist, biographer and children's author of Russian origin.

On her mother's side, she was descended from the aristocratic Poltoratsky family; her maternal grandfather was Serge Poltoratzky, the literary scholar and bibliophile who ended his days in exile, shuttling between France and England. His daughter Olga, the novelist's mother, grew up in Kent but was fascinated by her father's native Russia and in the early 1880s moved there, marrying Alexander Almedingen (of a family that had moved "from Spain... to Saxony, from Saxony to Austria, from Austria to Russia"^[1]), who had turned his back on his family's military traditions to become a scientist. After her father abandoned his family in 1900, they lived in increasingly impoverished circumstances, well described in her memoir Tomorrow Will Come, but the author was able to attend the Xenia Institute and eke out a living in the increasingly desperate times of revolution and civil war. In September 1922 she managed to get permission to leave the country and went to England, where she became a well-known children's author. In 1941 she won the $5,000 Atlantic Monthly nonfiction prize for Tomorrow Will Come. Five years later she moved to Frogmore, a house near Upton Magna in Shropshire, where she remained until her death.

Writings

• The Lion of the North (1938)
• Tomorrow Will Come (1941)
• Frossia (1943)
• Fair Haven (1956)
• Little Stairway (1960)
• Catherine the Great: a portrait (1963)
• The Unnamed Stream and Other Poems (1965)
• Little Katia (1966)
• Young Mark (1967)
• Charlemagne: a study (1968)

References

1. ^ E. M. Almedingen, Tomorrow Will Come (Holt Rinehart Winston, 1968), p. 19.

Persondata
Name	Almedingen E M
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1898
Place of birth
Date of death	1971
Place of death	England