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.
This is from Diana Wynne Jones’s book Reflections: On the Magic of Writing:
“Mindful of my own deprivation, I bought them book upon book, and I had all the pleasure and astonishment of discovering almost a hundred excellent books for children, but as an adult.
It was quite a bitter discovery that most of these hundred books had been available during my own childhood and that I could have read them then; but, looking back on it, I suspect it was a great advantage to read them with an adult and analytical mind for the first time, to discover how they were put together and to be able to watch three young children's response to these books.“
I can’t agree that it is a great advantage to discover excellent established children’s books only as an adult. Really good books demand to be read again and again, and we can get different things from them at different ages and stages in our lives. The first encounter should surely be when we still have a great sense of wonder and have not yet developed that adult, analytical mind!
Reading children’s books at a young age would not have prevented her from seeing her children respond to them. And if the deprivation was all for the best in the long run, why did she give these books to her children to read? There is some cognitive dissonance here!
I know all about such bitter discoveries and the devastation they can cause. It is difficult to accept the truth, face up to all the implications and admit to having missed something irreplaceable.
I think that Diana Wynne Jones was trying to be positive about the past because her best option was to try to come to terms with things as they were.
After all, she was a good and successful writer who had produced some excellent children’s books of her own, so she could perhaps afford to let this aspect of the past go.
Did the shortage of reading material throughout her childhood mean that she would never be the writer that she could have been? Did she miss something essential for reaching her full potential?
We will never know whether she would have been a better or worse writer or what books she would or would not have written if she had had access to as many books as she wanted during her childhood.
We can be sure though that getting all the reading material she desperately craved would have made her awful early life more bearable.
Just a few of the books written by Diana Wynne Jones:
