Eleanor Farjeon's writing career spanned almost half a century. Although not exclusively a children's writer, her reputation and main claim to critical discussion and evaluation rest with her poetry, prose, and drama written for children.

Marcus Crouch in The Nesbit Tradition (1972) maintains that at a time when children's literature in Great Britain had fallen away from its "Golden Age," Eleanor Farjeon, together with Walter de la Mare and John Masefield, managed to continue the creative force of fantasy writing through the 1920s and 1930s until new writers revitalized the mode in the 1940s. Her best work was not done as longer prose fiction, the genre that garners the greatest prestige, but as children's poetry. With de la Mare, Farjeon established poetry as a significant subgenre of children's literature. In fact, Eileen Colwell claims in Eleanor Farjeon: A Monograph (1961) that there are only two real children's poets this century--Farjeon...