The first known book to be set at a stage school, the first ballet story to be set in London, the first to feature upper middle class society, the first to show the limits of amateurism and possibly the first to show children as self-reliant, able to survive without running to grownups when things went wrong.

At the time, the plot and general 'attitude' of the book was highly original, and destined to provide an outline for countless other ballet books down the years until this day. Elder sister Ruth Gervis illustrated the book, which was published on the 28th September, 1936. In 28 September 1936, when Ballet Shoes was published, it became an immediate best seller.Īccording to Angela Bull, Ballet Shoes was a reworked version of The Whicharts. Dent and Sons, asks Noel to write a children's story about the theatre, which led to Noel completing Ballet Shoes in mid-1936. Early in 1936, Mabel Carey, children's editor of J. In June 1932, she was elected to membership of PEN. In 1930, she began writing her first adult novel, The Whicharts, published in 1931. At the end of the war in January 1919, Noel enrolled at the Academy of Dramatic Art (later Royal Academy) in London. When things took a turn for the worse on the Front in 1916 she moved to London and obtained a job making munitions in Woolwich Arsenal. As an adult, she began theater work, and spent approximately 10 years in the theater.ĭuring the Great War, in 1915 Noel worked first as a volunteer in a soldier's hospital kitchen near Eastbourne Vicarage and later produced two plays with her sister Ruth. Sister Ruth was the oldest, after Noel came Barbara, William ('Bill'), Joyce (who died of TB prior to her second birthday) and Richenda. She was born on Christmas Eve, 1895, the daughter of William Champion Streatfeild and Janet Venn and the second of six children to be born to the couple. Mary Noel Streatfeild, known as Noel Streatfeild, was an author best known and loved for her children's books, including Ballet Shoes and Circus Shoes.

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