Elizabeth Emily Charlton was born in 1852 the daughter of Congregational minister Rev. John M. Charlton. At the young age of eleven her first production was published by a children's magazine. Charlton would go on to pen fifty books under the pseudonym "Eglanton Thorne" mostly for the Religious Tract Society. She lived most of her life in London. While there, she was "an enthusiastic worker in a West London mission." She never married and died on 17 September 1907 in Plymouth.