Ernest George Henham

Ernest George Henham was a Canadian-British author who wrote novels at the beginning of the 20th century about Dartmoor and Devon, England. He also published literary works under the pseudonym John Trevena.

Ernest G. Henham was born in 1870 and his writings include a series of novels based on Dartmoor, the moorland in Devon, England, where he lived much of his life. He created a pseudonym, John Trevena, for many of his books. It was probably no coincidence that the surname he chose was the original name for Tintagel, the legendary location of King Arthur's castle.

Henham wrote more than two dozen books, which were published between 1897 and 1927. He was considered a recluse, but often used people he encountered in real life for the characters in his work. In addition to the United Kingdom, his books were also published in the United States. The New York Times reviewed his books twice, on 21 March 1908 and 23 August 1914. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy: Furze the Cruel, Heather and Granite. As stated by the author in his introductory remarks to Furze the Cruel:

Almost everywhere in Dartmoor are furze, heather and granite. The furze seems to suggest cruelty, the heather endurance, and the granite strength. The furze is destroyed by fire, but grows again; the granite is worn away imperceptively by the rain....

In his introduction to Heather, Trevena writes: "Heather, which flourishes only in pure air and sunshine, and blossoms again though it is torn by winds, seems to represent the spirit of Endurance." According to one American commentator,

...only Thomas Hardy and George Augustus Moore among contemporary novelists rival his art at its best. ... Trevena's novels are the expression of a passionate feeling for Nature, regarded as the sum of human personality and experience, in all its moods,--benign and malign, as man is benign and malign, and faithful to life in the stone as well as the flower...

John Trevena. By Violence with an Introduction by Edward J. O'Brien (Boston 1918). The natural world of the moor is important to many of his works and Trevena's themes are often about opposing ideas, such as educated vs. uneducated people; clean rural vs. dirty city living; and secular vs. religious philosophies. Trevena's personal perspective on the value of reading and writing is perhaps best captured in Sleeping Waters where he states:

...
Wikipedia