Mabel Dearmer
Jessie Mabel Pritchard Dearmer (née White; 22 March 1872 – 15 July 1915) was an English novelist, dramatist and children's book author/illustrator. She was a committed pacifist who died while caring for the war wounded in Serbia. Early life. Born Jessie Mabel Pritchard White, the daughter of surgeon-major William White and Selina Taylor Pritchard, she was educated in London and was trained by W. G. Wills. She entered Hubert von Herkomer's art school in 1891, but left the following year to marry the socialist liturgist priest Percy Dearmer. Writing career. In 1896 she began contributing  illustrations to "The Yellow Book", "The Savoy" and "The Studio". She notable created the cover for the Yellow Book's issue number nine. She soon after turned to children's book illustration. Dearmer created artwork for "Wymps, and Other Fairy Tales" and "All the Way to Fairyland" by Evelyn Sharp and "The Story of the Seven Young Goslings" by Laurence Housman (1899). She also illustrated several self-written titles, "Round-about Rhymes" (1898), "The Book of Penny Toys" (1899), and "The Noah’s Ark Geography" (1900). From 1902 Dearmer began writing for adults, beginning with "The Noisy Years" and its  1906 sequel "Brownjohn’s". Her autobiography "The Difficult Way" was published in 1905, and other titles include a historical romance "The Orangery: A Comedy of Tears" (1904), "The Alien Sisters" (1908), and "Gervase" 1909. A keen dramatist, in 1911 she founded the Morality Play Society, which performed productions of her plays "The Soul of the World" and "The Dreamer". Though a committed pacifist, Dearmer accompanied her husband when he volunteered as a chaplain to the British Red Cross. Joining the Third Serbian Relief Unit as a nursing orderly she left for Serbia in April 1915, but contracted enteric fever (typhoid ) in June, and died of pneumonia on 15 July. Her letters were posthumously published as "Letters from a field hospital. With a memoir of the author by Stephen Gwynn." Three months after her death, her younger son Christopher died in the Gallipoli Campaign. His elder brother Geoffrey Dearmer survived to the age of 103.