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’.