Many of the obituaries of Diana Wynne Jones dwelled on her early life—or rather her early life as she described it in “Something About the Author.” This tells how she was brought up in the village of Thaxted in Essex. Thaxted was through the 1920s and beyond a center for communism, Morris dancing, hand-thrown pots, and eccentric living. She always said how much she hated the village, but her particular brand of utopian fiction is actually quite hard to imagine without that bizarre social and political background. Her autobiography also says that Diana Wynne Jones and her sisters spent much of their childhood living on their own in an annex with a concrete floor, where they were deprived of books, and were neglected by their parents. Her mother repeatedly called her a clever but ugly delinquent. Her sisters don’t remember their childhood in the same way. I wasn’t there, so I can only say that she needed to remember her childhood in this way, even if that wasn’t quite how it was.
There is no doubt that this gives her fiction its characteristic darkness. Old women and failed mothers do not fare well in her stories. The central character of Black Maria is an elderly suburban lady of high respectability. She turns out to be a witch who uses magic to control a whole town full of zombielike conformist men. This particular witch is clearly based on my grandmothers. They are represented so cruelly that one of Diana Wynne Jones’s own characters might well cry out, “It’s not fair” if they read about them.
My mother’s mother was herself a formidable woman. She grew up in a very modest background in Sheffield. She became a scholarship girl, went to Oxford, and transformed herself into a speaker of impeccably cultivated BBC English. She probably did not much want to be a mother. She certainly could be cruel, and very much liked to be admired by men. She runs through my mother’s novels like a dark base note: she’s there in the wicked Witch of the Waste in Howl’s Moving Castle, who turns the young Sophie into a crone and who preserves her own beauty by magic. There is no doubt that my grandmother is the principal reason why Diana Wynne Jones’s Arcadias are so dark, and why her fictions so often associate imaginative children with lonely defiance and with sadness.
One of the most obvious but most profound truths about fiction is that it does not paint things as they are. Fiction is often, as a result, not fair. People who make up imaginative worlds—Arcadias, utopias—often do so because they feel wronged, or because they feel that there is something wrong with the world around them. Fiction allows them to create a world with its own set of values, in which punishments can be handed out according to the rules of the imagination and emotion rather than the rule of law. People who knew Dante, and who saw him put people whom he hated into his representation of hell, probably had exactly the same response as I do to some of my mother’s writing. Diana Wynne Jones used fiction partly to create worlds which were happier and more equal than our own, but she could also use fiction to take revenge on people she felt had injured or offended her.
I liked my grandmother, and I got punished for this in several of my mother’s books. When I was a teenager I listened to The Doors and did a lot of photography. No doubt in my mother’s eyes I was a chilly kind of thing. In Fire and Hemlock there is a chilly public schoolboy called Sebastian who likes The Doors and photography. He also happens to be in league with the glamorous and un-aging Queen of the Fairies, with whom he tries to erase the heroine’s memories and perform a human sacrifice.
Well, thanks, Mum. But fiction is not meant to be fair. My mother needed to tap some of her darkest experiences in order to write, and she gave moral values to different characters according to a profoundly idiosyncratic emotional language. Her fictional worlds were not straight transcriptions of the world she saw, but of the world she felt. And she said what she felt about people more readily in fiction than she did in person.
I’m a literary critic by profession, and most of the people I write books about—Milton, Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare—lived around four centuries ago. It’s therefore particularly odd for me to read my mother’s novels and see at once where so much of the fiction comes from. My old dog Lily is effectively the hero of House of Many Ways, for example. This gives me a quite different perspective on the poems and plays I think about in my day job. Many of the writers I work on created dark Arcadias of one kind or another—pastoral or fantastical worlds which are marred by some problem. It’s often said by literary critics that Shakespeare and Sidney and Spenser and Milton created Arcadian and pastoral fictions in order to reflect on their own worlds. If those Arcadias are dark—if kings are no good, or if queens are evil, if life in the forest becomes violent—critics usually end up saying that it’s because Sir Philip Sidney (or whoever it might be) didn’t like the foreign policy of Elizabeth I. We say that because we know a fair bit about the foreign policy of Elizabeth I, but we don’t know much about the intimate lives and aversions of authors from that period. I learned many things from my mother and her books, but perhaps the principal thing I learned was that dark Arcadias, like all fictions, almost certainly come from places in the imagination which are very private. Fictions are so closely tied up in the lives and the emotions of their creators that readers—even the author’s own children—can only see by glimpses where they really came from.
Address at Diana’s Funeral
Richard Burrow
Mum had many good qualities, particularly her sense of humor and her extraordinary generosity. When I came to write down my thoughts, however, I discovered I didn’t want to talk about these, but rather about her books and what they reveal about her as a person. This is because the real core of Mum is most evident in her books, for reasons that I hope to make clear. What follows then is not literary criticism, but an attempt to discover the person in the books.
I loved my mother desperately as a child. My fondest memories are of all three of us snuggling up to her for a bedtime story. She read very well and I often feel that she imagined her own books being read aloud as she wrote. They read aloud beautifully, as Neil Gaiman says in his obituary on the internet.1 Later on I was to read all her books to my own children, and I discovered an almost poetic beauty at times, especially in the Dalemark books, which I always imagine being spoken by some bard who has scraped them together from various oral traditions.
It is in these books and a few others like The Homeward Bounders, Hexwood, and Fire and Hemlock that one discovers the real heart of this deeply shy and guarded person: as with Charles Dickens and Georgette Heyer, two of her favorite writers, her books are sustained by an enormous love; a childlike yearning to create a world that fully satisfies the human soul. As with Dickens, this yearning is so powerful that it creates an almost poetic language and rhythm which help to transform the everyday world. (Dickens, it is said, had constantly to guard against slipping into blank verse, and reading Drowned Ammet, one feels that same songlike quality; music, always the most immediately emotional of the arts, constantly threatens to take over.)
This yearning or elegiac quality that one finds in many of Mum’s best books is partly a sign of the deep pain caused by her upbringing. At the heart of her books is a sense of loss. From this point of view, The Homeward Bounders, the most tragic of her books, is also the most honest. The main character is left literally creating worlds for others while never being able to return to his own. This book is atypical, however; more frequently the poetic beauty, the humor, and the sensuous vividness of the fantasy transport the reader away from this imperfect world. So many of the tweets that have flooded in recently have referred to one or other of Mum’s books as the writer’s “comfort book,” read time and again in times of stress. The pain of her upbringing may have meant that she could only give and receive comfort sporadically in the “real world,” but what she gave us is in a sense real in a deeper way: a direct line to that perfect world which all of us yearn for, whether we know it or not.
As I say, I read all her books aloud to Ruth particularly, who is dyslexic and was quite late learning to read. We had two copies of all of them, which mean
t that she could follow as I read. I remember solemnly forbidding her to read on by herself, knowing that she was so ornery that any encouragement would have backfired, and being secretly delighted the next night when I realized that she had read on a chapter, as well as disappointed at losing the pleasure of reading it aloud to her. It was in this cozy situation, reading aloud to my daughter, that Mum, like the incorporeal mother in The Spellcoats, came alive and spoke to me, offering me and anyone else who reads her books comfort.
Diana Wynne Jones Bibliography
ADULT BOOKS
Changeover, 1970
A Sudden Wild Magic, 1992
Deep Secret, 1997
STAND-ALONE CHILDREN’S BOOKS
Wilkins’ Tooth (US: Witch’s Business), 1973
The Ogre Downstairs, 1974
Eight Days of Luke, 1975
Dogsbody, 1975
Power of Three, 1976
Time of the Ghost, 1981
The Homeward Bounders, 1981
Archer’s Goon, 1984
Fire and Hemlock, 1985
A Tale of Time City, 1987
Black Maria (US: Aunt Maria), 1991
Hexwood, 1993
The Dark Lord of Derkholm, 1998
Year of the Griffin, 2000
The Merlin Conspiracy, 2003
The Game, 2007
Enchanted Glass, 2010
THE DALEMARK QUARTET
Cart and Cwidder, 1975
Drowned Ammet, 1977
The Spellcoats, 1979
The Crown of Dalemark, 1993
THE CHRESTOMANCI SERIES
Charmed Life, 1977
The Magicians of Caprona, 1980
Witch Week, 1982
The Lives of Christopher Chant, 1988
Mixed Magics, 2000
Stealer of Souls, 2002
Conrad’s Fate, 2005
The Pinhoe Egg, 2006
The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume I (contains Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant)
The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume II (contains The Magicians of Caprona and Witch Week)
The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume III (contains the short stories also found in Mixed Magics)
THE HOWL SERIES
Howl’s Moving Castle, 1986
Castle in the Air, 1990
House of Many Ways, 2008
FOR YOUNGER READERS
Who Got Rid of Angus Flint?, 1978
The Four Grannies, 1980
Chair Person, 1989
Wild Robert, 1989
Yes, Dear, 1992
Stopping for a Spell (contains Who Got Rid of Angus Flint?, The Four Grannies, and Chair Person), 1993
Puss in Boots, 1999
Earwig and the Witch, 2011
Short Story Anthologies
Warlock at the Wheel, 1984
Hidden Turnings (editor), 1989
Fantasy Stories (editor), (US: Spellbound), 1994
Everard’s Ride, 1995
Minor Arcana, 1996
Believing Is Seeing, 1999
Unexpected Magic, 2004
NONFICTION/HUMOR
The Skiver’s Guide, 1984
The Tough Guide to Fantasyland, 1996
PLAYS
The Batterpool Business, 1968
The King’s Things, 1970
The Terrible Fisk Machine, 1972
Diana Wynne Jones also wrote several poems and short stories that have been published in anthologies.
Index
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use your ebook reader’s search tools.
Page numbers in italics refer to photographs.
academics, xxiv, 276–77, 289, 295
adults: control over children’s books, 160–61, 244–45, 247; reading children’s books, 33, 35, 177–78, 244; refusing to read children’s books, 177
Agassi, Andre, 144
agents: see literary agents
Aiken, Joan, 72, 106
air raids, 273
alchemy, 53
Alcock, Vivien, 41
Alice in Wonderland, 256
Alice Through the Looking-Glass (Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There), 9, 121
allegories, 28, 85, 92, 101, 162, 205, 236
alternate worlds, 48, 199–201, 248, 253, 345–46
Amber Spyglass, The, 237, 245
Andersen, Hans Christian, 80
Andromeda, 84, 91
Anglo-Saxon, language, xxix–xxx, 58–60
Arabian Nights, The, 80, 274
Arcadias, 343, 345, 346, 349, 350
Archer’s Goon, xiii, xix, xxiv, 89, 154, 158, 218, 347; Goon 218; Quentin Sykes 158; Torquil 218
archetypes, 145, 166, 174, 242
Archimedes, 132, 169–70
Ariadne, 82, 143
Artegal, Sir, 91
Arthur, King, 10, 82, 202
assumptions about books, 35, 39, 42, 161
Atlantis, 27
Aunt Maria: see Black Maria
Austen, Jane, 208
autographs, 69
Avery, Gillian, 36
Bacchus, 143
baddies, 17, 62, 105, 112, 149, 161, 259
ballads, 60, 88, 89, 214, 215
banned books, 249
Battle of Britain, 266
Bear’s Son, the, 151, 152
Bell, Chris, 99, 110
Bellerophon, 91
Beowulf, 16, 59, 83, 87
Biggles, 52
Birkbeck College, London, 182
Black Maria, xx, 111, 142, 148, 153, 170, 224, 248, 348; Antony Green, 155; Aunt Maria, 154–55, 170, 348; Chris, 153–55, 170–71; Mig, 153–55
Blyton, Enid, 39, 72
Boadicea, 156
bombs, 134, 224, 266, 273, 285
book awards, judging, 44–45, 75, 167, 237
book signings, 35, 142, 231
books: coming true, 61, 157; endings of, 139–40, 174, 185; length of, 34–37, 109, 237, 249, 284; titles, 141; see also children’s books
Books for Keeps magazine, 233
booksellers, 160
Boskone, 99
Box of Delights, The, 73, 163, 171
Boy in Darkness, xxx, 233–36
boys’ reading habits, 4, 88, 145, 188
Brave Little Tailor, the, 81, 144
Brewer, D. S., 8
Bristol, 94, 157, 297, 314
Bristol University, 297
British Science Fiction Society, 157
Britomart, 86–87, 88, 89, 91, 93, 94, 156
Brunhilde, 56, 84, 156, 184
Bull, Emma, 33
bullies, 77, 87, 155–56, 248, 282
Burnett, Frances Hodgson, 193
“Burnt Norton,” 94
Burrow, John A.: see Diana Wynne Jones, husband
Burrow, Colin: see Diana Wynne Jones, sons
Burrow, Michael: see Diana Wynne Jones, sons
Burrow, Richard: see Diana Wynne Jones, sons
Cabell, James Branch, 233
Calypso, 90
Canterbury Tales, The, 84, 204
Carnegie Medal, xiii
“Carol Oneir’s Hundredth Dream,” xxiv, 212–13; Carol, 212–13, 215–17, 220–22, 229; Cast of Thousands, 219, 221; Chrestomanci, 212–14, 215–17, 221; Melville, 217; Tonino, 216
Carroll, Lewis, 9
Cart and Cwidder, 37, 88, 148, 296; Brid, 148
cats, 285, 312
Cecil, Laura, xxviii, 296
censorship, 121, 160, 166
Chandler, Raymond, 85
Changeover, 295, 311–13, 321
characterization, 255–59
characters in books, 3–4, 53, 127, 138–39, 148–49, 347; coming alive, 50, 247, 257, 341; repeated, 217–18
Charmed Life, xvii, 35, 148, 209, 216, 220, 224, 248, 297, 339, 341, 346; Chrestomanci, 220; Eric (Cat), 346; Gwendolen, 149, 341; Millie, 340; Mrs. Sharp, 220
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 7, 84, 8
5, 127, 204–05, 210
children: as readers, 34, 36–37; fears, 116; lack of power, 161, 134; laughing, 53; playing, 1–2; with problems, 75, 104, 164, 209, 246
children’s books, 77, 86, 166–68, 244; bad, 38, 190, 322; classics, 121; fantasy, 107, 111, 120, 322; reading them aloud, 38, 119, 354
Children’s Books Ireland, 211
Children’s Encyclopaedia, The, 124
Children’s Literature New England, 79
Chrestomanci, 148, 151, 212–13, 215, 220
Chrestomanci series, xiii, xxii, 248, 340
Christmas Carol, A, 42
Christopher, John, 106
“Cinderella,” 125, 147, 174
Circe, 90
Clarance House: see conference center, run by Diana Wynne Jones’s parents
Clarke, Arthur C., 169
“Clerk’s Tale, The,” 84
clichés, 38, 245
Clute, John, 99
conference center, run by Diana Wynne Jones’s parents (Clarance House), 63–64, 123, 124, 125, 182, 184, 185, 192, 224, 225, 275, 278, 285
Cooper, Susan, 106
Cradock, Fanny, 165
creative process, 115–16, 211, 215, 219
Cunningham, Valentine, 58, 60
“Cupid and Psyche,” 95, 96, 147
Daedalus, 74, 169
Dalemark quartet, xix, xxi, 148, 340, 352; Brid 148; Moril 148
Dante (degli Alighieri), 210, 293, 349
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