Stretton, HESBA

Stretton, HESBA, the pen-name of Sarah Smith, novelist and popular writer for the young, who was born at Wellington, Shropshire, where her father was a bookseller. Her first manuscript was accepted by Charles Dickens, and published in Household Words, to which she continued to contribute, as also to All the Year Round, until the death of its founder, whom she had found the most generous and sympathetic of editors. Jessica's First Prayer, published by the London Tract Society in 1867, and followed by a long series of semi-religious stories, interesting and pathetic, made her name a household word. She has published over forty juvenile stories and novels.