Dancer in Danger

Dancing Peel #5

by Lorna Hill

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Hill attended school in Durham and then went to Le Manoir in Lausanne, on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland. She obtained a BA at Durham University, and there met her husband, a clergyman. They moved to the remote parish of Matfen, Northumberland, where she played the organ in church and ran a Sunday school.

Hill's career as an author began when her daughter Vicki, then about ten years old, found a story her mother had written as a child and asked for about its characters. The result was a series of eight books about Marjorie & Co, illustrating them herself. These began to be published in London in 1948. They were followed by the Patience series and several others.

When Vicki left home to be a ballet student at Sadler's Wells in London, Hill missed her and began to write her Dream of Sadler's Wells series. She eventually wrote a total of 40 children's books, as well as La Sylphide, a commissioned biography of the dancer Marie Taglioni, and two romances for adults, published in 1978. Hill was then obliged to stop writing by ill health. She is said to have been firm with publishers and to have earned more from her books than many of her contemporaries. Translations of some titles into several other languages appeared, including less usual ones such as Finnish (by Pirkko Biström, 1991), Indonesian (1994), Czech (1995) and Slovenian (by Bernarda Petelinšek, 1996).

More information at Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Verity W · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read all (I think) of Lorna Hill's Sadler's Wells series, but this is the first of the Dancing Peel ones that I've read and I really quite enjoyed it. I was obviously missing a lot of the backstory to the characters (which makes a big difference in children's series like this) but the characters are fun and the setting was lovely. It is a little bit dated, as all these sort of books are these days, but it had a lot of the stuff that I've enjoyed in Hill's other books - and a few references to characters from the Wells too, which is something that I always enjoy. Probably not the best starting point for Hill's ballet stories, but if you like this sort of book, I'm sure you'd enjoy it.

[Madeeha Maqbool · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nostalgic and beautiful. I loved finally being able to read this at the British Library and was not disappointed nor was my childhood fantasy about this series ruined. Thank God!