Eva C. Rogers

• Born: early 1872, Plympton St Mary, Devon (registered January to March)
• Died: December 1909, The Cottage, Yelverton, aged 37
• Family: daughter of George Porter Rogers, a Plymouth businessman; married Stanley Thomas Pitts in 1901; two daughters, Margaret Elinor (1902 to 1986) and Dorothy Mary (born about 1906)
• Lived: Compton Gifford and Plymouth; Langstone, Pu Tor, near Horrabridge (1897); The Cottage, Yelverton
• Occupation: "Authoress" in the 1901 census
• Devonshire Association: member from 1897
• Best known for: The Magic Mist, and other Dartmoor Legends (Christmas 1900)

Eva Constance Rogers was born in Plympton St Mary in the first quarter of 1872 and grew up in Compton Gifford, Plymouth, the daughter of a Plymouth businessman. At thirteen she passed the junior theory-of-music examination at Plymouth, the earliest record of her we have. By the mid 1890s she was a guest at the Mayor of Plymouth's At Home, and in 1896 she began to publish: a satirical short story, Sir George, in Chapman's Magazine of Fiction in September, and a comic poem about a talking tree, An Autumn Tragedy, in The Boy's Own Paper in the autumn.

Her first children's book, The Bear's Kingdom, came out from the Sunday School Union in 1897 and stayed in print long enough to reach its twenty-fourth thousand. It was followed by A Tale of Four Foxes (S. W. Partridge, 1900), a story in Little Folks in 1899, fairy tales in The Queen in 1902 and 1905, a poem in Father Tuck's Annual for 1903, The Nymph Tamara in The Girls' Empire in 1904 and syndicated Christmas stories that ran in several newspapers in 1905 and 1906. Her full byline, Eva C. Rogers, stayed the same after her marriage, and her later bylines list her earlier books by name.

The Magic Mist, and other Dartmoor Legends is the book that ties her to the moor. It is a gift book of 295 pages in pictorial green cloth with gilt lettering, illustrated by Charles E. Eldred and P. B. Hickling, with a prefatory note by Robert Burnard, published for Christmas 1900 by Andrew Melrose of London and James G. Commin of Exeter. The book carries no printed date; reviews appeared in the Western Morning News on 18 December 1900 and in the Morning Leader on 21 December. Author, foreword writer and Exeter publisher were all members of the Devonshire Association, which Eva had joined in 1897 and which printed her name in its list of members (see the Transactions) as of Langstone, Pu Tor, near Horrabridge. That is the Dartmoor of Pew Tor, spelled the local way.

Her stories reach real places on the moor. In “The Bards of the Wood of Wistman” she gives the standing stone known as Beardown Man, near Devil's Tor, an invented origin: a pillar for a bard called Essára.

She was also a public figure in Plymouth. She was chiefly responsible for the arrangements of the Children's Happy Evening Association's Christmas treat for more than 800 children at the Corn Exchange in December 1899, and she was a bridesmaid at a society wedding in Plymouth in May 1901, three months before her own marriage to Stanley Thomas Pitts. She died at The Cottage, Yelverton, in December 1909, at 37, leaving two young daughters. Her husband later married her sister Alice May.

Her name did not last. A 2008 print-on-demand reprint of The Magic Mist printed the author as Eva C. Roberts, and library catalogues disagree about the book's date.

Sources: Devonshire Association, list of members (Transactions), 1897 entry; Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 10 August 1898 | Western Morning News, 23 December 1899 and 9 August 1901 | Census returns 1881, 1891 and 1901; birth, marriage and death registrations | Title page and cover of The Magic Mist, and other Dartmoor Legends | Chapman's Magazine of Fiction (September 1896); The Boy's Own Paper (1896); The Queen (25 January and 1 March 1902, 25 November 1905) | Portrait: Eva C. Rogers, about 1906, from a family tree on Ancestry.

Read more
Looking for Eva: the story of finding Eva C. Rogers

Books on this site

• The Magic Mist, and other Dartmoor Legends (1900)