It includes the slave trade in To Ravensrigg and the Captain Swing riots of the 1830s in No Beat of Drum and Otmoor for Ever.

Her subject matter often reflects a radical approach popularised by Geoffrey Trease. Fiction īurton's first children's novel was The Great Gale, published 1960 and inspired by the devastation of the North Sea flood of 1953 on her home county of Suffolk. In addition, Burton edited works by friends and colleagues, including Thomas Hardy: Distracted Preacher? Hardy's Religious Biography and its Influence on his Novels by Timothy R. She worked as an assistant editor for the revised Oxford Junior Encyclopaedia, and edited two 1959 anthologies: A Book of Modern Stories and Her First Ball.

She worked for Oxford University Press from 1956 to 1964, contributing two volumes to the Oxford Sheldonian English Series for secondary schoolchildren: Coleridge and the Wordsworths, 1953, and Tennyson in 1954. In 1949, Burton published a biography of Barbara Bodichon, the 19th-century feminist, artist and educationalist. From 1925 to 1936, she attended Headington School, Oxford and then St Anne's College, Oxford, where she received an honours degree in English.

She was born Hester Wood-Hill on 6 December 1913, in Beccles, Suffolk, where her father was elected town Mayor three times. Flood waters at Erith, 1953 which killed 41 people in Suffolk and inspired Burton's novel The Great Gale.

Castors Away by Hester Burton