After a time of reading history at Manchester University, she realized that what she really wanted to sing, and went on to study it with teachers in London, Paris and Leipzig[7][8] and to work as a freelance writer and lecturer.
[1] During World War II she was headmistress of an Evacuation School set up by Quakers in Manchester at Liverpool and Yealand Conyers, a small village in Lancashire, where children from those cities and from further afield were sent for safety, away from the wartime bombing.
She wrote nearly two dozen novels, stories and anthologies for children and young adults, including The Lark on the Wing, which won the Carnegie Medal in 1951.
[2] She used a man's pen name, Charles Vipont, to write adventure stories for boys (first in 1939); that was a common marketing device by Oxford University Press and other publishers of female authors.
[4] As "Elfrida Vipont", she wrote about two dozen books for children (and other works), including short biographies of the authors Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Jane Austen, published by Hamish Hamilton between 1965 and 1977.
Fouldes and the illustrator Raymond Briggs collaborated on a picture book for young children, The Elephant and the Bad Baby, published by Hamish Hamilton in 1969.
The Elephant and the Bad Baby is a "cumulative story" with a "poetic feel", a common effect drawn from the picture-book format of the text.
[16] Elfrida Foulds lived for many years at Yealand Conyers, Lancashire, where she was an active participant in community affairs, while travelling worldwide for Quaker committees and lecturing in schools and libraries.