To Ravensrigg

by Hester Burton

Emmie Heston, a ship captain's daughter orphaned by a violent storm, searches for the secret of her birth and returns at last to Ravensrigg, near Liverpool. A vivid novel of England still involved in the illegal slave trade, with a little romance at the end.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction

143 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Hester Wood-Hill was born on the 6th December, 1913 at Beccles in Suffolk.. She attended Headington School Oxford between 1925 and 1931 and then Oxford University between 1932 and 1936 when she received a honours degree in English. In 1937 she married Reginad W.B. Burton and had three daughters. For a while she was a part-time grammar school teacher and the Assistant Editor of the Oxford Junior Encyclopaedia.

Between 1960 and 1981 she produced eighteen books for children, most of them for the Oxford University Press and many of them illustrated by the incomparable Victor Ambrus. In 1963 she was awarded the Carnegie Medal for Children’s Literature for her story “Time of Trial”. Hester Burton died in 2000.

Reviews

[Farah Mendlesohn · Rating 5 out of 5]

She really is just so good. This year a number of books about Black British History have come out, and one of the things they strive to remind us, is that there have *always* been people who strove against the slave trade, and that the passage of laws did not immediately stop it. This book is set not long after the law declares that there can be no slaves in England: in the very first incident, Emmie Hesket discovers that this is untrue.

One of the things I like about this book though (and Geoffrey Trease's The Chocolate Boy) is that although the white child does significant things, the Black boy effects his own escape. No easy white saviour narratives here.

Burton should be back in print. She really is superb.

[Charise · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is set in England at the end of the 18th century. The main character Emmie Hesket is at the moment in her life when she is treated as a child but expected to act like a lady. When she is young her mother warned her "We women can long for freedom and justice for all mankind but it is through the actions of men that these blessing must be won. We women are too weak to fight these battles on our own." Lack of control is a major theme in the book, not only in regards Emmie struggling to have a voice in her own future but also showing how at this point in English history the anti-slavery laws were being openly flouted and the Quakers were being violently persecuted.
This is only a short book but like all books written by Hester Burton it is very engaging and chock a block full of historical details.