Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre: some 'coincidences' revisited

The 'coincidence' of Charlotte Brontë's childhood obsession with Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington and the subsequent appearance in her life of Arthur Bell Nichols was first mentioned in an article about being careful what you dwell on and again in an article featuring Jean Rhys.  

Another 'coincidence' in Charlotte Brontë's life that is worth highlighting and was also mentioned earlier is her accident involving a horse that echoes something that happened in Jane Eyre, which was published seven years before the event. 

Other people have noticed these connections. While they may assume that they are just interesting, but not particularly significant, coincidences, I thought at the time that certain unseen influences were at work, and I still think so.

Many years have passed since I first mentioned these two 'coincidences'. Since then, I have come across other examples of such coincidences and accidents. 

Something I recently read in Carole Angier's biography of Jean Rhys inspired me to take another look at the two incidents involving horses in the light of some of the later discoveries and produce an updated and enhanced version of events and my ideas about them.

Jane Eyre and the horse incident
The incident involving Jane Eyre and a horse occurs when she first encounters Mr Rochester. 

On the way to post a letter on a freezing winter's day, she sits on a stile for a while. She hears the sound of approaching hooves, then Mr Rochester comes into view on his black horse. Just as they are passing her, the horse slips on the ice and comes crashing down. Mr Rochester is hurt, so he asks Jane to catch the horse for him. This is not an easy task:

“I...went up to the tall steed; I endeavoured to catch the bridle, but it was a spirited thing, and would not let me come near its head; I made effort on effort, though in vain: meantime, I was mortally afraid of its trampling fore-feet.”

From Jane Eyre

The mystery of Jean Rhys, Aunt Maria, and Diana Wynne Jones

The article about Carole Angier's doubly-depressing biography of the novelist Jean Rhys includes an attempt to answer a big question the book raises: if it has such a bad effect, why read it and why comment on it? 

I said something relevant to this question a long time ago in the first article about Diana Wynne Jones's witch Aunt Maria: I persevere with some infuriating and/or depressing books because there are lessons to be learned and points and connections to be made from them. 

This article attempts to answer a small question that arose recently when I noticed a few similarities between Jean Rhys as described in Carole Angier's biography and the fictional Aunt Maria: could Diana Wynne Jones have been influenced by Jean Rhys: Life and Work when she was writing Black Maria aka Aunt Maria? 

After dealing with some of the more significant topics connected with Jean Rhys, I decided to investigate the possibility that Diana Wynne Jones had read Carole Angier's biography and, consciously or unconsciously, copied a little of the material for her children's book. 

I started by re-reading Black Maria in the light of what I had recently learned about Jean Rhys; some of the common elements I found this time around seemed worth highlighting - and more than just coincidence.

Wheelchairs and walking
Both Jean Rhys and Aunt Maria pretended to be more disabled than they really were. 

The first article about Aunt Maria mentions a scene in which the horrible old witch, who is supposedly can barely walk and spends much of her time in a wheelchair, is quite able to get up and go to the window when she sees something that angers her. 

When I first read this, I was immediately reminded of something I had read many years earlier about Jean Rhys while looking into the Jane Eyre connection: when she became angry with her assistant, she left her wheelchair in a flash to run to the door and lock it. 

Jean Rhys and her witchlike personality

Just as psychological black magic is a major topic in this blog, so are witches, fictional or otherwise, unconscious or otherwise.

Carole Angier's biography Jean Rhys: Life and Work, which is generating a whole string of articles, contains material that suggests that Jean Rhys was witchlike in many ways. This material includes the devastating effect that she had on people close to her and her attitude, behaviour and experiences throughout her life. 

It was interesting to learn that in later years she became completely bent over, like an old witch in a fairytale.

This picture makes her look rather sinister:

A witch for a neighbour
Jean Rhys said herself that her neighbours in Holt in Norfolk called her crazy and a witch, and that her neighbours in the Devon village of Cheriton Fitzpaine also called her a witch. She said that one of these neighbours was a witch herself, and that there was black magic in the village!

The evil witch in action
Carole Angier tells us that in later life Jean Rhys had dreadful moods in which she became sinister, witchlike and cruel. As mentioned in the article about Diana Wynne Jones's evil witch Aunt Maria, in one of these episodes Jean terrified her nurse/assistant by locking the door to prevent escape. Carole Angier uses an interesting expression when recounting this incident:

“Janet had 'never been so frightened', 'she'd never wanted to get out of anywhere more'. As though by black magic, Jean had transferred her own worst feelings of terror and entrapment to another person. She had made someone suffer like her.” 

In memoriam: Diana Wynne Jones

The fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones died on March 26th 2011, ten years ago today. 

There are several articles on here featuring or referencing various aspects of her life and works; here is another one to mark the occasion.

Diana Wynne Jones's book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing has already been mentioned as a source of fascinating and commentary-inspiring material; more information is available online in the form of interviews and various articles about her life and works.

I am particularly interested in finding connections between writers and detecting views, experiences, influences and elements that they have in common. It is very interesting to see them quite independently make the same points. 

Diana Wynne Jones has provided some good examples of connections with other writers in the past, most recently in the article about Nicholas Stuart Gray; here are a few more:

A terrible realisation 

Diana Wynne Jones said this about her awful childhood:

“Children think they are unique in their misfortunes, and I want to tell them they aren’t alone. I thought my childhood was normal, and was terribly angry and miserable when I discovered it wasn’t.”

I hadn't read that when I created the article about parents and prison guards, from which this is an extract:

“...no anger, no fury is stronger than the final, unavoidable realisation that the protector has betrayed his role and is really the destroyer. But it takes a while to find out that the unthinkable is not the status quo, and that your daily 'normal' is very abnormal to a larger world.“

From Cat in a Midnight Choir by Carole Nelson Douglas  

They are both spot on here. Putting personal experiences into the context of other, more fortunate, children's lives often does result in great feelings of anger, outrage and betrayal.

In memoriam: Nicholas Stuart Gray

The writer Nicholas Stuart Gray died on March 17th 1981, 40 years ago today. He was only 58 years old.

There are a few articles on here featuring characters from his books; here is another, more general, post to mark the occasion.

Nicholas Stuart Gray

Nicholas Stuart Gray was a very private person and there is little information available about his life, Much of the material that does exist can be found in a short Wikipedia entry and The Pied Pipers by Justin Wintle and Emma Fisher, which contains interviews with some influential creators of children's literature. 

Nicholas Stuart Gray was interviewed in 1974. He said something that I agree with very strongly. He said that he wrote plays -

“...to give the children a sense of magic. Nobody attends to this enough. They give them too much realism. They can see it all on the box, they can see frightful things there. They can read it in the papers. But they’re not being given a world to escape into…the world of the imagination...Children must have an escape line somewhere.”

Diana Wynne Jones, who was also of Celtic origin, had very similar views. She wrote about the uselessness and harmful effects of realistic children's books versus the beneficial effects of magic and fantasy. 

Both writers enhanced the lives of many children. They provided pathways into other worlds for children who needed to escape from something and escape to somewhere. They knew what this was like themselves; they both had awful mothers and as children they both made up stories to make their younger siblings' lives more bearable:

“From a young age, he (Nicholas Stuart Gray) made up stories and plays to amuse his brothers and sisters, and to try and escape his unhappy childhood.”

Stella Gibbons too created wonderful fairy tales that she told to her two younger brothers to help them escape from and temporarily forget their unhappy situation. 

Antonia White, a gold coin and impressionable children

This article was inspired by an incident that I read about in the novelist Antonia White’s account of her early childhood in As Once in May.

It concerns what she called one of the great disappointments of her life. It happened when she was only four years old.

In addition to being a schoolmaster, her father gave private tuition to young men. Antonia got talking to one of these pupils while he was waiting for his lesson. He was so impressed by her knowledge that he gave her a gold coin, a half-sovereign!

When her father arrived and noticed the coin, he forced her to return it. He could not possibly allow her to accept it; it was far too much money for a child of her age. Despite his pupil’s efforts on Antonia’s behalf, her father was adamant. The coin went back into the young man’s pocket.

As she left the room, holding back her tears, she heard her father say:

“It was exceedingly generous of you, but I’m sure that you’ll see my point of view. No, no, she won’t be disappointed. I’m sure she knew all along she couldn’t possibly be allowed to keep it. Don’t worry. By tomorrow she’ll have forgotten all about it.”

This is what Antonia White said decades later:

“He was wrong. After seventy-two years I have not forgotten that breathless moment of possession and the bitter sense of injustice when the treasure was snatched away...”

This is a very good illustration of something that that really stands out in the biographies and autobiographies of many writers: how hard they take some things and how they often never forget and never forgive a childhood injury.

Diana Wynne Jones had this to say, in connection with being permanently affected by not being permitted to read fantasy books as a child:

“And it does bring you hard up against the responsibility adults have, if only because it shows you what a truly lasting impression can be made on a child.”

This is from her book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing, which is full of such insights.

Diana Wynne Jones and two more coincidences

A previous article gives details of two occasions when something that Diana Wynne Jones had just written about manifested in her life. 

Diana Wynne Jones’s book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing contains two more examples of this phenomenon.

The first ‘coincidence’ happened at a time when she was working on her book Fire and Hemlock, for which the plot was, she thought, her own invention. An acquaintance railroaded her into a visiting a place where people started discussing a local legend - which strongly resembled her plot.

The second incident happened while she was working on Archer’s Goon. One of the characters discovers a newborn baby in the snow. The same acquaintance went out for a walk and found an abandoned baby!

The two incidents in Diana Wynne Jones’s own words:

The Fire and Hemlock incident 
“Sometimes, however, the book comes true while I am actually writing it, and this can be quite upsetting. 

Fire and Hemlock was one of those. One of the many things that happened while I was writing it was that an eccentric bachelor friend from Sussex University, who stayed with us while he was lecturing in Bristol, insisted on my driving him to some stone circles in our neighborhood. There, he began having mystic experiences, while I kept getting hung up astride the electric fences that crisscrossed the site. My outcries, he said, were disturbing the vibes, so he sent me to the local pub to wait for him. 

As soon as I got there, the landlady and the other customers began talking about these same stone circles and related the local story about their origins. This story is called “The Wicked Wedding”: the bride, who is an evil woman, chooses a young man to marry, but at the wedding, the devil comes, kills the young bridegroom, and marries the lady himself. 

This is the story behind Fire and Hemlock and, believe it or not, I had never heard it before - I thought I'd made it up. Well, after various other strange experiences, my eccentric friend went back to Sussex and I finished the book.”

Passing it on: Diana Wynne Jones and the fantasy ban

An article or two about the very big, complex and excruciatingly painful subject of why people who have suffered at the hands of their parents often go on to make their own children suffer in exactly the same way has been on my mental to-do list for many years now.

There is also something to say about people who make a conscious decision not to pass on to their children the ill-treatment they experienced. They may have been receivers but they did not become transmitters.

The time has come to look at a few examples and try to think of a few explanations. The examples mainly involve writers who have been featured or mentioned on here.

It was something I read recently in Diana Wynne Jones’s account of her early life that made me decide to finally get some ideas down on paper at long last Her story provides a very good example to start with: it tells of someone who passed it on to someone who didn’t. 

Diana Wynne Jones and two generations of censorship
In her book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing, Diana Wynne Jones tells us how she was starved for reading material throughout her childhood.

Her mother, who was an appalling person, added insult to injury by censoring the Piper at the Gates of Dawn chapter in The Wind in the Willows because it was ‘too fanciful’.

More about Diana Wynne Jones and her book deprivation

Some writers have very interesting things to say about books, reading and writing. I like it even more when they mention public libraries too!

Diana Wynne Jones is yet another writer whose thoughts on these topics have inspired some commentary. 

I have something to add to the previous article about the dire shortage of reading material that she experienced as a child.

I said earlier that thanks to public libraries I didn’t miss much in the way of good books when I was growing up. I am very grateful for that. I feel very sorry for imaginative children with enquiring minds who were forced to subsist on a diet of crumbs of reading material.

Diana Wynne Jones is a little ambivalent on the subject. After reading about the perpetual book famine and the desperate begging, saving and scrounging, I was surprised to see that she said that perhaps it was all for the best in some ways.

Diana Wynne Jones and the shortage of reading material

Diana Wynne Jones is yet another writer who was a voracious reader as a child. Unfortunately, she never had nearly enough books to satisfy her appetite for reading material. As she put it, she suffered from a perpetual book famine.

Her book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing contains some interesting - although very painful to read - autobiographical material; it was the source of an amusing anecdote, and it also provides some information about the vital part that books and reading played in her early life.

A few extracts will show what she was up against when trying to obtain more books to read. 

A starvation diet of books
Diana Wynne Jones’s father was stingy and tight-fisted in the extreme: 

“...birthdays were the one occasion when my father could be persuaded to buy books. By begging very hard, I got Puck of Pook’s Hill when I was ten and Greenmantle when I was twelve. But my father was inordinately mean about money. He solved the Christmas book-giving by buying an entire set of Arthur Ransome books, which he kept locked in a high cupboard and dispensed one between the three of us each year.”

So she too liked Rudyard Kipling and John Buchan! 

I would have felt very short-changed indeed if all I was given for Christmas was one Arthur Ransome book - and he is not one of my favourite authors anyway!

Stella Benson’s Living Alone: Part II

Stella Benson’s fantasy novel Living Alone contains an assortment of characters.

There isn’t much to say about the purely supernatural element, which includes fairies, a magical white horse and a small dragon.

The ‘real people’ in the book include a policeman, a grocer who is also Mayor and some ladies from a charity committee. They are mainly caricatures or stereotypes, and most of them don’t inspire much in the way of commentary either.

The characters who are of particular interest are a witch, a wizard and someone who is neither magical nor a completely real person.

This article covers the two practitioners of magic, Richard the Wizard and Angela the Witch.

Richard the Wizard

We first learn about Richard from what his mother says about him. She says that he isn’t like other women’s boys. He cannot read or write; he disappears without explanation. The servants are all gone because they can’t stand him and his ways.

Living Alone was first published in 1919; one hundred years later, some of the things that we are told about Richard could be taken as a description of someone with mild autism or something similar.

Richard’s mother tells Angela the Witch:

“Do you know, I have only once seen him with other boys, doing the same as other boys, and that was when I saw him marching with hundreds of real boys ... in 1914.... It was the happiest day I ever had, I thought after all that I had borne a real boy... He deserted twice—pure absence of mind—it was always the same from a child—'I wanted to see further,' he'd say...“

We are told that Richard seems to have none of the small skill in details that comes to most people before they grow up. He does everything as if he were doing it for the first time.

Stella Benson’s Living Alone: Part I

I recently re-read Stella Benson’s fantasy novel Living Alone to see what she has to say about witches. As with many other books featured on here, I first read it many years ago and just for entertainment. 

At the time, I overlooked things that now seem very significant indeed; I now see that there is enough material about witches, wizards and magic to generate more than one article.

There are also some autobiographical elements in the book; they will be included in an article about Stella Benson herself.

Part I starts with an overview of Living Alone and continues with some material from the book about magic and its practitioners.

About Living Alone

Living Alone consists of just ten chapters, so it is sometimes called a novella.

Living Alone has been described as a comedy, but it mentions desolation and has a horrible ending.

It is a very strange and unusual book, yet there are some familiar elements:

There are whimsical descriptions in Living Alone that make me think of J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.

The witches and their broomsticks in the book remind me of Terry Pratchett and his witches.

There are a few scenes that remind me of the use of magic in Diana Wynne Jones’s Charmed Life.

London has a magic of its own. There are many references to locations in London, places that I know well and enjoy reading about. Stella Benson was writing from experience: she too knew London well.

Anyone who wants to read Living Alone will find it on Project Gutenberg.

Elizabeth Goudge’s Linnets and Valerians: Part II

The first part of this article introduced the witch Emma Cobley and her black magic. There is a lot more to say about her, her magic and her adversary Uncle Ambrose.

Magic making

Emma Cobley performs her black magic literally by the book - a spell-book that she wrote herself. She also makes potions, draws diagrams and sticks pins in figurines made from mandrake roots. She uses ingredients such as animal blood, boiled frogs and wolf’s bane.

This is all very traditional.

One of her potions makes a man dote upon a woman. It is possible that she used this one on Hugo Valerian. If so, his promise to marry her was obtained illegitimately. This is similar to what happened in the case of Helen Penclosa and Austin Gilroy.

The retired doctor whose housekeeper Emma became was very fond of her: he educated her; he left her some money when he died. She was able to live quite like a lady.

We are not told whether or not Emma used any of her potions and spells on the doctor to get his money and his knowledge. We are told that she was beautiful, clever and quick to learn, which together with the fact that he left his house and most of his money to his sister suggests that she did not. She just used her natural attributes to charm him.

It is a pity that she didn’t do this to find someone else after Hugo Valerian rejected her instead of taking revenge on him.

Another of her spells causes a man and woman who love each other to become estranged; it is very likely that she later used this one on Hugo and Lady Alicia.

The spells that she used may have affected her for the worse.

By using spells that cut people in a relationship off from each other, Emma may have activated forces that isolated her from the good, decent people in her village and prevented her from finding someone else. She never married and associated mainly with unpleasant people.

Elizabeth Goudge’s Linnets and Valerians: Part I

Best-selling novelist Elizabeth Goudge is not one of my favourite authors, although I do like some aspects of some of her books.

I heard of Linnets and Valerians only recently. When I learned that one of the characters is an evil witch, I got a copy in the hope that there would be enough suitable material for an article or two.

I found that much of the book is not about the witch and is not very relevant to this blog. However, some elements are worth a mention and there are a few connections to be made.

Linnets and Valerians

This amusing little book, which was first published in 1964 and later retitled The Runaways, is set in 1912.

In summary, the four high-spirited and resourceful young Linnet children run away from their autocratic grandmother to stay with their eccentric Uncle Ambrose. They enter a wonderful new world filled with magic and superstition and help to lift some long-standing curses.

The main character of interest is Emma Cobley, who is the local witch. There is nothing original about her and her story, but the book provides yet another example of a typical fictional witch.

Emma Cobley

Emma Cobley owns the village general store, which has a low green door. This where the children first meet her: they go in to buy some sweets. They have trouble getting the door open. The light inside is so dim that it is a while before they notice the proprietor, who is knitting.  

She is a little old dame with beady black eyes that notice everything. She wears a white mob cap, a black dress and a red shawl - familiar colours that are connected to the three phases of the moon.

Her sweets of many colours look magical in their glass bottles.

This is all very symbolic.

Today’s birthdays: Georgette Heyer and Diana Wynne Jones

Georgette Heyer was born on August 16th 1902.

Diana Wynne Jones was born on August 16th 1934.

There is nothing in Georgette Heyer’s novels relevant to the themes of this blog, although she has been featured here because of some similarities in her and Stella Gibbons’s lives. 

Diana Wynne Jones is very different: her life and her books have been mentioned in several articles and there is still more material to come. 

While Georgette Heyer never wrote about magic, witches or anything occult, Diana Wynne Jones wrote about little else. I wonder whether Georgette’ Heyer’s happy childhood and Diana Wynne Jones’s awful one had anything to do with this.

These two writers have only a few things in common.

They were both born in London and both moved around a lot - at least for a while. They were both heavy smokers, and both died from lung cancer.

While both were very tall, they were very different in appearance. Georgette Heyer was elegant, stylish and kept up with the fashions; Diana Wynne Jones was wild-haired and rather witch-like.

One of the biggest differences is their attitude to publicity.

Georgette Heyer kept herself from the world for most of her life. She is described as ‘ferociously reticent’.

Diana Wynne Jones gave interviews and talks; she visited schools; she wrote articles and spoke about the creative process and her life.

The two authors were usually treated very differently by people they met, as these two amusing anecdotes show:

Rudyard Kipling and the House of Desolation: Part III

Part I describes the abandonment of Rudyard Kipling and his younger sister by their parents. Part II continues the story and ends with his release from what seemed to him like a prison sentence with torture thrown in.

There are still a few questions outstanding and points to be made.

Did Kipling lie about or exaggerate his suffering?

I remember reading somewhere that when Kipling's parents first read the account of his time in Southsea, they tried to get his sister Trix to say that it hadn't been as bad as he said it was. This is what happens in many such cases; people said the same thing to Charlotte Brontë, when actually she had toned down her account of life at the dreadful school.

There is a lot that could be and has been said on this subject. Writers certainly use their imagination to create good stories. For many, what happens in their imagination seems real to them, more real even than what really happened. Some use what happened in real life as just the starting point for building a whole edifice of fiction. Some present occasional incidents as happening frequently and such things as minor criticisms as vicious attacks. This may seem like lying and exaggeration to some people.

However, it is not only a case of what actually happened, but the kind of person it happened to and what the effects were. Some collective-minded, grounded people might be resilient and recover quickly; they might let it all go, put it behind them, forgive and forget and get on with their lives. Others, perhaps more imaginative and sensitive and wide open to subtle energies, may have little insulation or resistance and be permanently affected in the core of their beings. Some people feel everything on an archetypal level; some get bad feelings in overwhelming and concentrated doses, enough for one hundred normal people.

I believe that Rudyard Kipling told the truth about what happened and did not exaggerate the effect it had on him. I also believe that a very different type of boy might have been much less affected and even been treated better. Jane Eyre said much the same thing about herself.

The childhood of Ayn Rand: some very familiar features

We may not be as unique, unusual or individual as we thnk we are.

I have seen many examples online of people saying such things as, “I could have written that myself” and, “Are you me?” and, “That is a perfect description of MY mother.” They seem surprised to find that there are others out there who are just like them or who have had exactly the same experiences.

I have been reading about the early life of Ayn Rand. Her generation, nationality and family situation are very different from mine, yet much of her early life seems like a description of my early life. Many of her characteristics, views and experiences are very familiar; some of it reminds me of what I have read about the early lives of some writers of interest.

Some basic elements of her personality

In her biography The Passion of Ayn Rand, Barbara Branden tells us that Ayn Rand was not very interested in other children and didn’t fit in with or get on well with them; I was much the same: on the whole, they seemed alien, boring, incomprehensible and sometimes dangerous.

She was very serious and intense, too much so for the liking of her fellow schoolgirls. I was too. She felt that she failed them by not reacting, responding or behaving according to their expectations. Some of us are wired very differently on the inside from the majority of our contemporaries and just cannot fit in with them.

Ayn Rand obtained positive attention from the people around her only because of the qualities of her mind. The only time I got positive attention was when I repeated the ridiculous political ideas that I was force-fed and brainwashed with.

Ayn Rand’s intelligence ‘created a pressure to be fed’. My mind too demanded huge amounts of food and fuel in the form of books and information. I was always hungry for more.

She felt a driving ambition from an early age; I did too.

She was future-oriented from earliest childhood; I was too.

She loathed physical activity; I hated some of it too, although in my case it was not only because organised exercises and games in school seemed pointless but also because I was weakened by being eaten alive by energy vampires. Stella Gibbons too hated being forced to play team games at school; she had no interest in them and didn’t care who won.

Two bus breakdowns: accidental or not?

I was feeling very worried and under the weather a few weeks ago. I went for a series of long bus rides just to get away from things and see some new areas, buildings, houses and parks. Perhaps I should have stayed in until the bad feelings passed, as on one occasion there was a minor incident.

I was on a single-decker bus that stopped at the foot of a steep hill to pick up some people. When the driver tried to move on, it just made strange noises and juddered a bit. He was unable to get it going again, despite making every effort. He radioed for help, and was instructed to get us all off so that we could catch the next bus.

As the driver stepped off the bus, he turned to me and said:

“This is all your fault!”

He was only joking, but many a true word is spoken in jest.

No one was inconvenienced for very long: the next bus came along in under 10 minutes. The driver obviously appreciated a break in routine, a little excitement and the chance to have a cigarette. Even so, I did feel a little guilty.

I have had strange experiences with malfunctioning electrical equipment in the past, always when I was feeling very jangled. I also remembered a day many years ago when something similar happened.

Diana Wynne Jones: two alarming coincidences

I have written about some connections I made between certain scenes in Charlotte Brontë’s writings and events in her life. 

I doubt whether she ever realised that incidents she had created and dwelt on in her imagination had manifested in the real world. 

Diana Wynne Jones is another matter. She did notice a connection between what she was writing about and unexpected, unwelcome incidents in her life. This example comes from Diana Wynne Jones’s book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing:

“… And my books have developed an uncanny way of coming true. The most startling example of this was last year, when I was writing the end of A Tale of Time City. At the very moment when I was writing about all the buildings in Time City falling down, the roof of my study fell in, leaving most of it open to the sky.”

Diana Wynne Jones’s witch Aunt Maria: part III

A brief summary of Diana Wynne Jones’s Black Maria makes it seem like a complete fantasy, a children’s story that is interesting and entertaining but has little relevance to real life. I have actually found much of it familiar, informative and very useful - not so much the purely supernatural parts but the scenes involving mind control and manipulative behaviour. 

It is ironic that this little book is considered suitable reading for eight-year-olds yet it has caused me to produce so much material that I decided to break my article first into two then into three parts.

Telepathy, spying and psychic attacks
One member of Aunt Maria’s circle gives Mig a book of pictures, the kind a little girl will love. Some of them are indeed of flittery little fairies, but others are frightening and sinister: the worst one is titled ‘A naughty little girl is punished’ and makes Mig feel ill. This seems like a message, a warning, and reminds me of one of the disturbing pictures sent to Marianne in Marianne, the Magus and the Manticore by Sheri S. Tepper.