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!
For me, the thousands of books in the public library compensated for the relatively small number of books my family owned; it was very different for Diana Wynne Jones:
“...before I was fourteen, I had read...all thirty books from the public library in the guildhall.”
She had a sister who also loved to read. It is painful to hear about the deprivation that they both endured and the lengths they went to in their search for reading material:
“Isobel and I suffered from perpetual book starvation. We begged, saved and cycled for miles to borrow books, but there were still never enough.”
All this terrible deprivation makes me feel very privileged in comparison with Diana Wynne Jones.
I was kept short of many things as a child, but books were not one of them. As mentioned in the previous article, I was always close to big public libraries and I could pick and choose the best books from the well-stocked shelves. I was given some lovely books both for Christmas and at other times.
There is a very big difference between being hungry for books, as I often was, because of having a big appetite, and starving, as Diana Wynne Jones and her sister always were, because of a lack of nourishment for the mind and imagination.
There is more to come about Diana Wynne Jones’s early life and her writing.
“...before I was fourteen, I had read...all thirty books from the public library in the guildhall.”
She had a sister who also loved to read. It is painful to hear about the deprivation that they both endured and the lengths they went to in their search for reading material:
“Isobel and I suffered from perpetual book starvation. We begged, saved and cycled for miles to borrow books, but there were still never enough.”
All this terrible deprivation makes me feel very privileged in comparison with Diana Wynne Jones.
I was kept short of many things as a child, but books were not one of them. As mentioned in the previous article, I was always close to big public libraries and I could pick and choose the best books from the well-stocked shelves. I was given some lovely books both for Christmas and at other times.
There is a very big difference between being hungry for books, as I often was, because of having a big appetite, and starving, as Diana Wynne Jones and her sister always were, because of a lack of nourishment for the mind and imagination.
There is more to come about Diana Wynne Jones’s early life and her writing.
