Elsie Jeanette Dunkerley (25 November 1880 – 9 January 1960), was an English girls' story writer, who took the name Oxenham as her pseudonym when her first book, Goblin Island, was published in 1907.

She is considered a major figure among girls' story writers of the first half of the twentieth century, being one of the 'Big Three' with Elinor Brent-Dyer and Dorita Fairlie Bruce.

Elsie Jeanette Dunkerley was born in Southport, Lancashire, England, in November 1880, to an English father and a Scottish mother.

The six Dunkerley children in order of age were: Elsie, Marjory (Maida), Roderic, Theodora (Theo), Erica and Hugo.

Everything that the 'Writing Person' [her on-page persona] told Maidlin, Jen and Joy, in The New Abbey Girls (published 1923), about dancing, Grey Edward, and the Camp Fire had happened as described.

[4] Oxenham is best known for her Abbey Series of 38 titles which chart the lives of the main characters from their mid-teens until their daughters reach a similar age.

The motto, deliberately using a quote from the Shakespeare play Hamlet, is taken to mean to make the right choice, usually duty above self-interest, when it arises.

[5] Throughout the Abbey Series the various main characters come up against this choice and its consequences, and are shown growing and maturing through making difficult decisions.

[9] Once Mary-Dorothy Devine, first introduced in The Abbey Girls Again, becomes a writer, statements she makes about the writing experience must logically be those of Oxenham herself.

[10] Some fifteen years later according to the internal chronology of the series, and nearly thirty years later in real time, Mary-Dorothy advises Rachel Ellerton, a younger writer who has been trying to get her adult fiction published, to try writing for children: ...my books are for girls, not for grown-ups, but I've felt it worth while to write them ... I’ve never dared to think I could help grown-ups; I doubt if I could even amuse or interest them.

In her very first book, Goblin Island, published nearly fifty years earlier, and written in the first person, Jean, the narrator, says, Being an author’s daughter, of course I tried to write stories too.

[14] These in-depth conversations tend to appear less frequently in the later books, but even as late as 1948, in A Fiddler for the Abbey Mary-Dorothy Devine, who has become "advisor-in-chief to the clan"[15] talks to Rosalind Kane about the biblical concept of "rain falling on the just and the unjust" and the reasons behind the occurrence of both good and bad events.

The books written from this time for the next six years or so, until Abbey Girls Win Through (1928) depict members of the EFDS hierarchy with affection and almost reverence.

It may have been as simple as the move to Worthing and the impossibility of maintaining as close a friendship at a distance of some sixty miles, but it has been conjectured that 'Madam' (Helen Kennedy North) and 'The Pixie' (Daisy Caroline Daking) may have objected to the way they were being portrayed.

[18] Oxenham never lost the love of folk dancing itself, however, and always shows it as a healthy form of exercise, and a way of lifting oneself out of depression.

The Camp Fire ideals of Work, Health and Love–'Wohelo'–and the training for young girls in household tasks and cookery it provided, were integral to Oxenham's own philosophy, and underlie the plots of several books.

Elsie J. Oxenham is considered by collectors of British Girls' Fiction to be one of the 'Big Three'; the other two being Elinor Brent-Dyer and Dorita Fairlie Bruce.

The UK EJO Society was founded in 1989 as a "postal meeting place" for all who collect the books of Elsie J. Oxenham and are interested in her work.

As well as the Buckinghamshire/Oxfordshire area which is the background for Girls of the Hamlet Club and the village of Washford, Somerset where Cleeve Abbey is situated, Oxenham used parts of Sussex, Wales, Lancashire, the English Lake District and Scotland for the settings of several books.

The UK Society holds a biennial meeting at Halsway Manor in the summer, which includes folk-dancing and tours of nearby Cleeve Abbey as if it were the fictional one.

These places are not always depicted in the books exactly as the real sites; Oxenham was writing fiction, and given that she could move an abbey several hundred miles for her purposes, changing a few names and telescoping or stretching distances was also well within her remit.