Two collections of forgotten stories by Noel Streatfeild are to be published for the first time. They were discovered among the late writer’s papers.

Streatfeild, who died in 1986, is the author of some of the best-loved classics of children’s literature, from Ballet Shoes, her tale of the adventures on the stage of the Fossil sisters, to White Boots, about rivalry on ice skates. She began writing children’s books in 1931 after working in munitions factories and canteens during the first world war and as an actor.

Ballet Shoes was published in 1936. In 1938, the writer won one of the earliest Carnegie medals for The Circus Is Coming, in which two children join the circus following the death of their aunt. According to her then publisher Penguin, when the author visited its Puffin exhibitions there would be queues “right out of the building and all the way down the Mall”. Streatfeild’s final work, Meet the Maitlands, was published in 1978.

The unpublished short stories were discovered after the author’s nephew William Streatfeild invited Donna Coonan, editorial director of Virago Modern Classics, to look through his aunt’s papers. Virago is also republishing the author’s classic novels Caldicott Place and Apple Bough in July.

William Streatfeild recently donated the author’s manuscripts and papers to Newcastle’s Seven Stories museum to ensure they would be well cared for and available to future readers and researchers. “We had such fun looking again through the boxes of papers before they went,” he said. “I found it amazing that Noel could work her tear-jerking magic with even very short stories.”

Coonan said: “I could hardly believe what gems there were in the files – stories written between the 1940s and 70s. Streatfeild’s output was prodigious: she wrote for children’s annuals, radio programmes, newspapers and magazines, and from these we have compiled two anthologies.” The stories, she added, were typed on thin paper and have the author’s annotations on them.

Virago Modern Classics will publish Streatfeild’s Christmas Story Collection in November. “As you’d expect from the writer of Ballet Shoes, there are lots of tales from the stage and a marvellous Christmas pantomime outing with the Bell family – but there is so much more,” Coonan said. A holiday-themed collection will follow in summer 2019.

“She once wrote that a children’s writer must have ‘the ability to remember with all their senses their own childhood, and what it felt like to be a child’. It is this quality that makes her so exceptional,” Coonan said.