Eden Phillpotts

For sixty years Dartmoor was Eden Phillpotts’s great subject: a cycle of eighteen novels, each set in a different quarter of the moor, and many plays and poems besides.

Born in India and educated in Plymouth, Phillpotts worked ten years as an insurance clerk before he gave himself to writing. He settled in Devon for good, first at Torquay and later at Broad Clyst near Exeter, and made the county, above all Dartmoor, the country of his imagination. His comic novel Widecombe Fair (1913) became his most popular, reworked as the play The Farmer’s Wife and filmed by a young Alfred Hitchcock in 1928. He wrote several books with his friend Arnold Bennett, and was an early encourager of Agatha Christie, a near neighbour who credited his advice and dedicated Peril at End House to him.

“This book is a failure. The action moves stiffly…” Eden Phillpotts, inscribed in his own copy of The Portreeve (AbeBooks)

The Dartmoor Cycle

1. Children of the Mist (1898)
2. Sons of the Morning (1900)
3. The River (1902)
4. The Secret Woman (1905)
5. The Portreeve (1906)
6. The Whirlwind (1907)
7. The Mother (1908)
8. The Virgin in Judgment (1908)
9. The Three Brothers (1909)
10. The Thief of Virtue (1910)
11. The Beacon (1911)
12. Demeter's Daughter (1911)
13. The Forest on the Hill (1912)
14. Widecombe Fair (1913)
15. Brunel's Tower (1915)
16. Miser's Money (1920)
17. Orphan Dinah (1920)
18. Children of Men (1923)

Other Dartmoor writing

• Down Dartmoor Way (1896)
• The American Prisoner (1904)
• The Poacher's Wife (1906)
• The Striking Hours (1901)
• Knock at a Venture (1905)
• A West Country Pilgrimage (1911)
• A Dartmoor Village (1937)

Sources: Wikipedia · Legendary Dartmoor · ISFDB · Devon & Exeter Institution bibliography. Portrait by J. C. Dingham (before 1899), public domain via Wikimedia Commons.