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.
Writing and humour as a means of moving on
Diana Wynne Jones said this in connection with the realisation that her childhood was very far from normal:
“It took me years to find my equilibrium, but I gradually worked it out – I suppose, writing books.”
Stella Gibbons too used her writing to work out various issues from her early life. From Reggie Oliver's biography Out of the Woodshed: Portrait of Stella Gibbons:
“Having seen how her father had handed on the misery of his childhood to her own, she was determined to break the cycle and lift the curse. Her own liberation came through laughter which can be a braver and a more radical therapy than any obtained through psychoanalysis or counselling.”
The laughter here refers to her book Cold Comfort Farm and the enjoyment she got from writing it and reading it aloud to her colleagues while working on it.
This is a very relevant quotation from Diana Wynne Jones:
Incidentally, unlike Enid Blyton and Antonia White, neither Diana Wynne Jones nor Stella Gibbons passed on their painful childhood experiences to their children.
Toning it down
Diana Wynne Jones said this in a letter in 1996:
“As a child I had parents. They were worse than anything in my books. If I put in anything out of my childhood, I always have to reduce it to a tenth of what was actually true, because people wouldn't otherwise find it credible. Example, my sister tied knots in her hair to keep it out of her eyes. This was not noticed for more than six months. Then I got the blame. In The Time of the Ghost I found I had to reduce the six months to days or nobody would have believed it.“
It was much the same with Charlotte Brontë and Jane Eyre. The cruelty and deprivation that Jane experienced at Lowood School was based on Charlotte's own experiences at Cowan Bridge School. When they learned that this section of Jane Eyre was autobiographical, some critics accused her of inventing or exaggerating the abuse she suffered. She had actually toned it down. From Wikipedia:
“...when Mr Williams, reader at Smith, Elder & Co, congratulated her for the narrative vigour of her description, Charlotte, unusually vehemently, insisted that it was true, and that furthermore she had deliberately avoided telling everything so as not to be accused of exaggeration.”
Being accused of lying, embellishing and exaggerating is an occupational hazard for people who tell the truth about their experiences as a child; it adds insult to injury.
What Diana Wynne Jones and Charlotte Brontë said about people not believing them if they told the full truth does not of course apply to anyone who has experienced something similar.
Educators and hunger
Diana Wynne Jones's parents were 'progressive educators'. They were very neglectful, and she and her sisters often went hungry.
By coincidence, Bronson Alcott was known as a pioneer of progressive education – although obviously not in the 1930s sense – and the Alcott girls and the children in the Alcott House School near London that was run according to Bronson Alcott's principles were often hungry too. He thought that a diet of bread, cold water and raw fruit and vegetables was enough for anyone.
The Reverend Carus Wilson, who was the inspiration for the Reverend Brocklehurst in Jane Eyre, was not a progressive educator but he imposed his ideology on children who were a captive audience and wrote publications to educate people. Reading about the many deprivations endured by the Wynne Jones girls reminds me of the suffering of the girls in the dreadful Cowan Bridge/Lowood School; they went hungry too.
When Diana told her publisher just a little of how her mother had treated her, the publisher wanted to kill the awful woman. I feel the same way about Bronson Alcott; Carus Wilson too makes me wish I had a time machine and a hit squad!
Reflections: On the Magic of Writing
There are two editions of this book. The first edition has a blue and gold cover and the later edition a red and black one. Their pictures can be found in previous articles. There is no colon in the title by the way, but reviewers and sellers usually put one in so I have too.
I bought Reflections on eBay a few years ago. I got the blue and gold copy. I paid £8 for it; now this edition is being sold for £180!
Both editions contain a foreword by fellow fantasy author Neil Gaiman.
Some final words from Neil Gaiman
The day after Diana Wynne Jones died, fellow fantasy author Neil Gaiman wrote a tribute to her. It began:
“Diana's been my friend since about 1985, but I was a fan of hers since I read Charmed Life in about 1978, aged 17. I've loved being her friend, and I'm pretty sure she loved being my friend. She was the funniest, wisest, fiercest, sharpest person I've known, a witchy and wonderful woman, intensely practical, filled with opinions, who wrote the best books about magic, who wrote the finest and most perceptive letters, who hated the telephone but would still talk to me on it if I called...”
https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2011/03/being-alive.html
The 'witchy and wonderful' Diana Wynne Jones with Neil Gaiman in 2010:
