Clayton, Eleanor (‘Ellen’) Creathorne (1834–1900), illustrator and writer, was born 15 February 1834 in Gloucester Terrace, Dublin, the eldest child and only daughter of Benjamin Clayton III (1809–83), a member of a long-established family of Dublin engravers, and his wife Mary (née Grahame) of Dublin. Both her brothers entered the family profession, as did her aunt Caroline Millard (née Clayton) (d. 1894), who was successful as a wood engraver and watercolourist. In 1841 her father left Dublin and settled with his family in London. Ellen displayed an early aptitude for drawing and writing, and by the age of fourteen was contributing articles and illustrations to her father's paper Chat. She subsequently contributed to another of his projects, a comic weekly entitled Punchinello, and to Sala's London. Determined to become an artist, she studied in the National Gallery and the British Museum for over a year and regularly copied pictures in Dulwich Gallery, but increasingly turned to writing to support herself.
Clayton's first publication was The world's fair (1851), focused on the exhibition of that year. She went on to write and illustrate many of her own books, primarily novels, children's stories, and histories of women, which included Notable women (1859, reprinted 1875), Women of the reformation (1861), Queens of song (1863), which she researched in Paris, Female warriors (1879), and A girl's destiny (1882). In one of her best-known works, English female artists (1876), she criticised Irish society's attitude towards women artists. She designed cards and calendars for Rimmell (a perfumer on the Strand, London), worked as an illustrator for Judy, and frequently contributed stories to London Society. After her marriage in February 1879 to James Henry Needham, a London solicitor, she continued to publish under her maiden name. Clayton died 19 July 1900 in a London nursing home. Her publisher, William Tinsley, described her as ‘a very fair artist’ who ‘in the end, I am afraid, dragged out a poor existence, although she was a good, hard-working little woman, and deserved a better fate’ (ii, 335).