[2] She was baptised at Great Queen Street Wesleyan Methodist Chapel on 22 February 1857 as Eveline, but changed her name to Evelyn in later life.
She was educated at home until the age of 12, then at Gower Street Preparatory School, where she wrote a historical tale about Lady Jane Grey.
Next came a year at Bedford College, London on a Reid scholarship (1872–1873),[3][1] during which she wrote Tom's Tempest Victory, her first novel.
[5] While in Albury, Everett-Green wrote numerous historical novels and somewhat fewer moral tales for the Religious Tract Society.
[6] Much of Everett-Green's fiction and non-fiction was meant for girls, but she also wrote boys' adventure stories such as A Gordon Highlander (1901).
[2] Contemporary critics, such as one from the Chicago Daily Tribune, said the works were written with "obvious good intention", but the "day of the weepy, fainting, blue-eyed... heroine has vanished.
[1] However, while popular enough to bring in adequate income, they lack real distinction and are now generally read for the light they shed on social backgrounds.
[8] In that year, however, Evelyn and Catherine moved abroad and eventually settled in Quinta Pico de São João, Madeira.
[1] Dominic James has suggested their partnership may have been a romantic one, in line with the same-sex relationship Everett-Green outlined in Fast friends; or, David and Jonathan (1882), which was published under a pseudonym.
I liked to watch her from my window as she paced in her stately way to and fro upon the terrace.... My grandmother was herself a reserved and silent woman; moreover, she was imbued with a sound and practical common sense that I have never seen equalled, and which gave her a power and discernment rarely to be met with.
"[12] The figure represented in this extract exemplifies the recurring theme of a stern and authoritative matriarch seen in the eyes of an adoring and respectful young woman.
[13] Indeed her status as a writer for the juvenile female market has led to her works being lumped together as conservative and reactionary by critics such as Kimberley Reynolds.
[6] Conversely, Kimberley Reynolds has noted that some such characters are powerful only within the domestic sphere and do not change the conventional patriarchal order.