Eileen Soper biography

Eileen Alice Soper (26 March 1905 - 18 March 1990; Enfield, Middlesex, UK)

Eileen Soper was an etcher and illustrator of children's and wildlife books. She produced a series of etchings, mainly of children playing, and illustrated books for other writers, notably for Enid Blyton and Elizabeth Gould, and wrote and illustrated her own children's book.

Some of her illustrations of children and animals were used in a china series for children by Paragon China in the 1930s. Later in life she concentrated on writing and illustrating wildlife books. She was a founder member of the Society of Wildlife Artists (SWLA) and was elected a member of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters, Sculptors and Gravers (RMS) in 1972.

Eileen showed early promise as an artist and two of her etchings were shown in the Royal Academy in London at the age of 15 after she showed three prints at an exhibition organised by the International Society of Printmakers in California. She continued to produce around 180 etchings mostly of children at play into the early 1930s. Queen Mary bought two of her etchings, among them 'Flying Swings' in 1924. Her work was popular and well received and shown in the UK and the USA.

Today Eileen Soper is best known for her collaboration with Enid Blyton, most notably all of the Famous Five books.

Eileen Soper also published her own children's books in the 1940s, a book of poetry and from the 1950s on worked mostly on her wildlife illustrations of British wildlife around her house in Welwyn.

See EILEEN SOPER ART.