Within the past few years, much to her delight and bemusement, the books of Elinor Lyon have been rediscovered and republished and her work as a children’s writer recognised after three decades of undeserved neglect.

Elinor Bruce Lyon was born at Guisborough, Yorkshire, in 1921. Her father’s family were of Scottish ancestry. She attended Headington School in Oxford and in 1939 began studying English at Lady Margaret Hall, but with the outbreak of war she left to join the WRNS as a radar operator.

She had already met her future husband, Peter Wright, when he was a young English and classics master at Rugby, the school at which her father P. H. B. (Hugh) Lyon was headmaster for many years. In 1944 she and Peter married and after the war returned to Rugby, where she began to write. In 1975, on Peter’s retirement, they moved to Harlech and Elinor threw her energies into their garden, local life and the pleasures of children and grandchildren. Her books fell out of print and for three decades seemed forgotten. Peter died in 1996.

A lover of the outdoors and of wild and remote locations, Elinor Lyon had written her books while bringing up her four children within the community of Rugby School. Her fictional worlds centre on those themes of freedom and captivity so characteristic of children’s books of the postwar period.

Apart from one book, The Golden Shore (1957), a time-slip novel about Ancient Greece, her 20 published books are adventures set in Wales or Scotland. The first of a series of eight “Scottish” novels, The House in Hiding (1951), features Ian and Sovra Kennedy. In the third (Run Away Home, 1953) and thereafter they are joined in their adventures by the feisty orphan Cathie Gunn.

Lyon illustrated the first 12 books herself using the technique of silhouetted pen and ink figures that evoked, through simple stance or gesture, some moment of high narrative tension. The earliest books also included her delicate watercolour plates.

The novels were praised by one reviewer for “their humour, the lively realistic dialogue, the understanding of children and the originality”. The novel Wishing Water Gate (1949) appeared with a jacket endorsement by Walter de la Mare: “A deal of close thinking must have gone into its bright-vivid and complex plot and its lively English; I enjoyed every page.”

The books celebrate friendship, loyalty, family values and a sense of “rootedness” within a locality. A communicable affinity between character and landscape underruns the exciting plots, the villainous intrigues, the coincidental happenings, the messing about in boats, on cliff edges, in treacherous caverns, on lonely mountains. Characters glory in the patterns of weather and are proudly protective of their local landscape, its history and its inhabitants: they are uplifted and enriched by their natural surroundings. The opening lines of The House in Hiding have Ian declaring: “I’m glad I’m alive, and looking at Skye, and eating marmalade tart . . . I might easily not be.”

Elinor Lyon made her intentions and responsibilities as a writer clear, declaring that “as well as excitement and humour I have tried to express deeper themes that arouse strong feelings in most children — justice, freedom and compassion”. Unlike more plot-driven writers of that time, she created believable, determined characters whose idealism, sensitivity and commitment reflect something of the way this modest writer lived her life.

Elinor Lyon is survived by four children.

Elinor Lyon, children’s author, was born on August 17, 1921. She died on May 28, 2008, aged 86