Books with author Edith Howes

Wonderwings and other Fairy Stories by Edith Howes is a short collection of sweet and masterfully written stories for adolescents. Each of the stories comes with morals that are important to draw for teenagers, making the tales entertaining and highly educative. The collection includes four stories. The tale from the title of the book, Wonderwings is about the quest of a young fairy for beautiful wings and the good deeds she has to accomplish in order to get them; the second story, The Magic Mirror, is about a queen trying to find out the secret that makes the neighboring kingdom so prosperous, while the third, Fairy Tenderheart is about a fairy who wants to help humans by easing their sufferings, even if she has to sacrifice her existence as a fairy. Edith Howes was born in 1872 in London, but her family emigrated to New Zealand when Edith was young and she spent most of her life in New Zealand. She completed her studies as a teacher in 1893 and started teaching in the same school she used to attend. In 1899, she became infant mistress at Gore School, where later she held the position of head mistress in the period between 1914 and 1917. She was head of the junior department at the WellingtonGirl College until she retired in 1919. She started writing stories to use them as teaching aids. She believed that any material is easier to learn when it is wrapped into a tale. Her first book, entitled The Sun’s Babies, came out in 1910 and brought her the instant appreciation of critics. More than 30 other children’s books followed, the most popular being Fairy Rings, published in 1911, and The Cradle Ship,which came out in 1916. She also published articles on topics related to the role of women and,in 1919, she summarized her views and philosophy on education, as well as her sharp criticism of the education system in New Zealand in a book entitled Tales Out of School.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.