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Everard's Ride
Contains two never-before-published novellas, "Everard's Ride" and "The True State of Affairs," six other stories, and an article on Tolkien's narrative art. Color dustjacket art by Ruth Sanderson.
303 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1997
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About the author
Diana Wynne Jones
160 books12.1k followersDiana Wynne Jones was a celebrated British writer best known for her inventive and influential works of fantasy for children and young adults. Her stories often combined magical worlds with science fiction elements, parallel universes, and a sharp sense of humor. Among her most beloved books are Howl's Moving Castle, the Chrestomanci series, The Dalemark Quartet, Dark Lord of Derkholm, and the satirical The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Her work gained renewed attention and readership with the popularity of the Harry Potter series, to which her books have frequently been compared.
Admired by authors such as Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, and J.K. Rowling, Jones was a major influence on the landscape of modern fantasy. She received numerous accolades throughout her career, including the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, two Mythopoeic Awards, the Karl Edward Wagner Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. In 2004, Howl's Moving Castle was adapted into an acclaimed animated film by Hayao Miyazaki, further expanding her global audience.
Jones studied at Oxford, where she attended lectures by both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. She began writing professionally in the 1960s and remained active until her death in 2011. Her final novel, The Islands of Chaldea, was completed posthumously by her sister Ursula Jones.
Admired by authors such as Neil Gaiman, Philip Pullman, and J.K. Rowling, Jones was a major influence on the landscape of modern fantasy. She received numerous accolades throughout her career, including the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, two Mythopoeic Awards, the Karl Edward Wagner Award, and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement. In 2004, Howl's Moving Castle was adapted into an acclaimed animated film by Hayao Miyazaki, further expanding her global audience.
Jones studied at Oxford, where she attended lectures by both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. She began writing professionally in the 1960s and remained active until her death in 2011. Her final novel, The Islands of Chaldea, was completed posthumously by her sister Ursula Jones.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 22, 2025
Everard's Ride
It’s Christmastide sometime in the middle of the 19th century, that twilight period between the winter solstice and the New Year when there might be strange visitations and the interface between worlds is thin enough to pass through.
And where else should one expect that interface to be thinnest than an island, a tump as it were surrounded by a moat, preferably with a seemingly ruined castle on it? Time and place are then set for something magical to happen.
And that’s what Diana Wynne Jones promised us in this novella penned early in her career: a visit to a kind of fairyland, a perilous realm where mortals should fear to tread. Though inklings of her later themes and literary motifs are already in evidence, this is not yet the glorious firework display of her later fantasies; still, I think there’s enough here that invites favourable comparisons with other work published in this genre in the 1960s.
Cecilia and Alex are the teenage children of Josiah Hornby, a well-to-do farmer with a holding somewhere on the eastern coast of England. Their neighbours, the Courcys, are minor gentry, and the youngsters feel condescended to by that family’s numerous offspring. However, canny Josiah has managed to purchase an island overlooked b the Hornby farm – perhaps somewhat akin to the causewayed Essex islands of Mersea or Osea – which happens to be crowned by the ruins of a castle; it also has a legend of death occurring whenever a ghostly Wild Rider appears galloping along the causeway.
Josiah is a cruel, demanding father to Alex and Cecilia and when circumstances with the Courcys get too fraught the pair pick their way along what can only be a fairy path through quicksands to the island. And it’s now, at this special time of year, that they discover that the castle is not ruined, that there are lands beyond the island, and that the people they meet in strange Renaissance garb regard them as Outsiders with a singular curse associated with them; and it’s now that Alex and Cecilia’s travails begin in earnest.
The 1960s saw an explosion of outstanding, innovative fantasy aimed at young readers, and though not published for nearly three decades, Jones’s novella when viewed retrospectively would have fitted comfortably with many of these. The children’s fantasies I’m most reminded of here are Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958) by Philippa Pearce and, before that, A Traveller in Time (1939) by Alison Uttley, as both of these involve unusual temporal slippages. But Everard’s Ride is very much a one-off and its own thing: it has a complex plot spread over four parts, full of antipathies, betrayals, confusion and deaths before we get to the main climax (when we discover what the title refers to). It would therefore be remiss of me to give even the baldest of synopses, so I will instead say a few words about what most struck me in this, my latest re-read.
First and most importantly, for all that Cecilia and Alex interact with flesh-and-blood humans, this is quite clearly a version of the folklore motif of the mortal human’s sojourn in fairyland. The fact that this princedom’s inhabitants regard the pair (and any other visitors) as Outsiders living in another era strongly supports this impression; meanwhile Outsiders view riders from the uninhabited island as ghostly apparitions, much as they would other denizens of the Otherworld.
Following on from this, it’s not hard to sense a major difference, almost a disconnect, with Jones’s later work. In Everard’s Ride people find it difficult if not downright impossible to accept anything supernatural or magical, whereas with fiction published from the early 1970s onwards magic is much more routinely accepted, especially by children, and even in some titles (like Charmed Life) it’s a given. Jones acknowledged this sea-change in her approach to writing, pointing to having children of her own and getting the chance to read all the children’s books which she’d been denied as a child, plus watching her own sons’ reactions to having them read to them.
Finally, what came strongly to my attention this time was a motif that recurs a lot in Jones’s later work, namely the domineering father. A significant figure in titles such as The Ogre Downstairs, Time of the Ghost, and A Tale of Time City as well in the final works like The Game and Earwig and the Witch, the overbearing father figure here is Josiah Hornby: he stands somewhere between Conrad, the villain of the novella, and a wandering individual astride a donkey who is introduced as a seer. The author frequently drew attention to her own father Aneurin – distant, dismissive, and prone to fly into uncontrollable rages – and there’s little doubt that Alex and Cecilia when recipients of Josiah’s temper closely reflect the author’s childhood experiences.
There is so much to appreciate, from descriptions (such as “the powdery snow flew up under its hard crust in winking rainbows like a shower of ground diamonds”) to the masterful way sudden reversals of fortune drive the narrative forward and give it a sense of urgency — but I think I’ve said enough: each reader needs to appreciate this work for itself. Now if only some enterprising publisher would give Everard’s Ride its proper due and issue it as a standalone . . .
It’s Christmastide sometime in the middle of the 19th century, that twilight period between the winter solstice and the New Year when there might be strange visitations and the interface between worlds is thin enough to pass through.
And where else should one expect that interface to be thinnest than an island, a tump as it were surrounded by a moat, preferably with a seemingly ruined castle on it? Time and place are then set for something magical to happen.
And that’s what Diana Wynne Jones promised us in this novella penned early in her career: a visit to a kind of fairyland, a perilous realm where mortals should fear to tread. Though inklings of her later themes and literary motifs are already in evidence, this is not yet the glorious firework display of her later fantasies; still, I think there’s enough here that invites favourable comparisons with other work published in this genre in the 1960s.
Cecilia and Alex are the teenage children of Josiah Hornby, a well-to-do farmer with a holding somewhere on the eastern coast of England. Their neighbours, the Courcys, are minor gentry, and the youngsters feel condescended to by that family’s numerous offspring. However, canny Josiah has managed to purchase an island overlooked b the Hornby farm – perhaps somewhat akin to the causewayed Essex islands of Mersea or Osea – which happens to be crowned by the ruins of a castle; it also has a legend of death occurring whenever a ghostly Wild Rider appears galloping along the causeway.
Josiah is a cruel, demanding father to Alex and Cecilia and when circumstances with the Courcys get too fraught the pair pick their way along what can only be a fairy path through quicksands to the island. And it’s now, at this special time of year, that they discover that the castle is not ruined, that there are lands beyond the island, and that the people they meet in strange Renaissance garb regard them as Outsiders with a singular curse associated with them; and it’s now that Alex and Cecilia’s travails begin in earnest.
The 1960s saw an explosion of outstanding, innovative fantasy aimed at young readers, and though not published for nearly three decades, Jones’s novella when viewed retrospectively would have fitted comfortably with many of these. The children’s fantasies I’m most reminded of here are Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958) by Philippa Pearce and, before that, A Traveller in Time (1939) by Alison Uttley, as both of these involve unusual temporal slippages. But Everard’s Ride is very much a one-off and its own thing: it has a complex plot spread over four parts, full of antipathies, betrayals, confusion and deaths before we get to the main climax (when we discover what the title refers to). It would therefore be remiss of me to give even the baldest of synopses, so I will instead say a few words about what most struck me in this, my latest re-read.
First and most importantly, for all that Cecilia and Alex interact with flesh-and-blood humans, this is quite clearly a version of the folklore motif of the mortal human’s sojourn in fairyland. The fact that this princedom’s inhabitants regard the pair (and any other visitors) as Outsiders living in another era strongly supports this impression; meanwhile Outsiders view riders from the uninhabited island as ghostly apparitions, much as they would other denizens of the Otherworld.
Following on from this, it’s not hard to sense a major difference, almost a disconnect, with Jones’s later work. In Everard’s Ride people find it difficult if not downright impossible to accept anything supernatural or magical, whereas with fiction published from the early 1970s onwards magic is much more routinely accepted, especially by children, and even in some titles (like Charmed Life) it’s a given. Jones acknowledged this sea-change in her approach to writing, pointing to having children of her own and getting the chance to read all the children’s books which she’d been denied as a child, plus watching her own sons’ reactions to having them read to them.
Finally, what came strongly to my attention this time was a motif that recurs a lot in Jones’s later work, namely the domineering father. A significant figure in titles such as The Ogre Downstairs, Time of the Ghost, and A Tale of Time City as well in the final works like The Game and Earwig and the Witch, the overbearing father figure here is Josiah Hornby: he stands somewhere between Conrad, the villain of the novella, and a wandering individual astride a donkey who is introduced as a seer. The author frequently drew attention to her own father Aneurin – distant, dismissive, and prone to fly into uncontrollable rages – and there’s little doubt that Alex and Cecilia when recipients of Josiah’s temper closely reflect the author’s childhood experiences.
There is so much to appreciate, from descriptions (such as “the powdery snow flew up under its hard crust in winking rainbows like a shower of ground diamonds”) to the masterful way sudden reversals of fortune drive the narrative forward and give it a sense of urgency — but I think I’ve said enough: each reader needs to appreciate this work for itself. Now if only some enterprising publisher would give Everard’s Ride its proper due and issue it as a standalone . . .
July 26, 2015
I read this in Mixed Magics, but this one specifically changed me. I'm not sure how, but I had this morbid fascination with it, years ago, and read it over and over and over and am now left with a feeling of a) forgetting something and b) being different. Which maybe should be concerning.
February 22, 2017
Everard's Ride is very obviously an early work. In fact, had I not known it was DWJ I doubt I would have guessed. It's a bit as if she's attempting something in the style of E. Nesbit. It's not bad, but it's not really memorable, either. I was surprised to discover that I hadn't read it before. For completeness, by all means read it, but it's a long way from typical DWJ.
January 25, 2024
Diana Wynne Jones’s works usually have happy endings but the short stories in this collection are much more bittersweet. The writing is very compelling but I was absolutely gutted by the ending of the final story. These are mostly aimed at adults and read much more like Angela Carter stories than Jones’s usual stuff
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 12, 2014
The title story was ok but a bit young for me; I preferred No One and the True State of Affairs. Plague of Peacocks reminded me a bit of the Pinhoe Egg from the Chrestomanci series.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews