Forgotten Vintage Children's Lit We Want Republished! discussion

How have I overlooked Penelope Lively?! She's one of my favourites! Oh dear.

Well, here's a bio on her in the 2 May 1980 ed. of Books for Keeps:

14 BOOKS FOR KEEPS No. 2 MAY 1980
nAuthorgraph No.2
Penelope Lively was born in Egypt and 'trapped by the war'
lived with her family on the outskirts of Cairo until 1945
when they returned to England. She was twelve and had
never been to school. Home teaching instructions were
frequently sunk in the Mediterranean.
'So it used to end up just with reading. As a system of
education it leaves a lot to be desired — as a background for
a writer it was perfect.' An only child, with no one to play
with, she read and read and has gone on doing that ever
since.
Boarding school in England was a miserable experience. But
reading history at Oxford was very different; she loved it.
'I didn't realise at the time the sort of effect it was having
on me. I wasn't a particularly good student of history —
wasn't aroused by it at that point, but obviously something
very curious happened because what I did during those
three years has utterly changed the way I've thought about
things ever since. It certainly turned me into a writer in the
sense that it bred a kind of lasting interest in and concern
with not so much history but the operation of memory,
what people do with the past and the uses and abuses that
people make of the past, and the ways in which memory
functions.'
The exploration of these ideas in novels for children and
adults was part of the future. 'I came out of university
without any proper sense of the reality of the past' — all
that came much later. It was a gradual unfolding over years
which included marriage to Jack, two children, living in a
sixteenth-century house in an Oxfordshire village, getting
in touch with the landscape and the past beneath it, and
putting down roots — most important for her she thinks
because of the years spent abroad.
Then with the children, 9 and 13, 'clearly it was time to get
going again.' Teaching seemed the obvious thing so it was
back to reading history. The more I read, the more I
realised that what history had to do with me wasn't going
to be anything to do with teaching it. It was to do with
some very odd personal response. In a very muddled way I
thought there might be something I could write that would
help me to sort that out. I started writing for children out
of a kind of humility. It didn't seem to me that anything I
had to say about the operation of memory could be of
interest to people who knew more about it than I did.'
'In the first place I suppose I was doing it for me — that's
probably quite the wrong thing.' The early books look
'wrong' to her now — 'hamhanded'. 'But I'll say this for
them, they tell a good story.' In the early books (Astercote,
The Whispering Knights), 'I was learning how to do it. It
takes a long time to learn — the learning is the doing.


Some of the photo captions:
The date on a beam in the kitchen at Duck
End says 1628. Penelope Lively vows not to
become attached to this house as she did to
her first which was painful to leave. 'I've
only just recently been able to go back to
see it without feeling distressed.'
The house sits on the side of the hill and at
the back, beyond the lawn and a thick yew
hedge, the garden falls in steps down to the
stream. Here too is the vegetable garden,
a fairly recent obsession and the source of
great satisfaction and pleasure.
Penelope Lively works in the room off the
kitchen. The deep window recesses are ! '
filled with plants — she likes growing things
— and her collection of Victorian samplers
hangs on the walls. Beside the typewriter are
the exercise books which contain all her
notes for the current novel. The Snoopy
card was 'a lovely surprise' — it arrived
recently signed by 25 children and simply
said 'Happy Birthday — w e enjoyed reading
Thomas Kempe.'
What sort of a person is Penelope
Lively?
She likes talking to people, being with
friends, walking but not travelling (this
year's new year resolution was 'Must travel
more'), exploring London (There's a
London book coming soon I think'),
listening to music ('I'm musically illiterate
but have very musical children who are
patient with me'), reading and writing. 'I'm
not happy if I'm not writing. I can't
conceive of not doing it.' She hates 'waiting
for reviews' and 'going in aeroplanes'. If you
gave her thousands of pounds, 'I would hire
a van, go to Blackwells in Oxford, park on
the double yellow lines outside and spend
an afternoon choosing books and having
them loaded up — that would be lovely.'
Penelope Lively's books are published in
hardback by Heinemann and in paperback
by Piccolo.
All photographs by Richard Mewton

(photographs of low quality - first is of a very symmetrical, quaint farmhouse (2 storeys, chimneys either end, central door, long country lane and hedges), and the other two are the author at her desk from the side turning back (seated), or in profile (seated and typing - electric typewriter))

More from same (https://booksforkeeps.co.uk/wp-conten...

A sense of time
A sense of place
A sense of humour

Three aspects of all Penelope
Lively's novels for adults and
children. How does she define
them?

Time
'The notion that there are points in time at
which people are fossilized as themselves at
any particular age seems to me both
dangerous and ludicrous. We all carry within
us all the ages that we have been and all the
ages that we may yet become. Nobody is
frozen at any point in time. I hoped to
suggest this to children.'

In Penelope Lively's novels the past comes
to meet the present: Thomas Kempe, a
seventeenth-century sorcerer/apothecary
reacts to the twentieth century. 'I don't
like stories where they go bumping people
back into the past. What is the point unless
it's going to enlarge commentary on the
present in some way. That kind of excursion
seems to me pointless.'

Place
'It's a difficult thing to define. It's a sense of
being enlarged, inspired by and dependent
on a physical place — it doesn't have to be
beautiful. Some places have a "charge" — I
don't mean anything to do with ley lines.
If I know about the history of a place,
something in me responds to it and the
place responds back — it gives me something.
It's faintly mystical but rational too.'
Penelope Lively's places are usually those
she has known well — her grandmother's
house in Somerset (Going Back), Exmoor
(The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy), the B4525
(The Driftway) — but not always.
'I fell onto Lyme Regis by mistake. I was so
taken with it, I knew I was going to set a
book there. I had to work out what the
book was going to be.' The place, Victorian
samplers, Charles Darwin and fossils all
came together in A Stitch in Time
'One fossil remained to be identified . . . just
a hint of patterning on a lump of the blue
rock that at first glance appeared to be
nothing in particular. What I need, she
thought, is a book.
"Stomechinus bigranularis," said the
writing, "an extinct form of sea urchin.
Found below the west cliff 3rd August
1865." And it's August now, thought Maria,
a different August. And she sat thinking
about someone else ( a girl, I'm somehow
sure she was a girl .. .) who had held the
same book just about a hundred years ago.'
A Stitch in Time (winner of the Whitbread
Award).

(photo captions):
The fossils were collected by Penelope
Lively at Lyme Regis.
/
The Rollright stones — one of the sources of
The Whispering Knights. The stones' powers
help to protect the village from the evil
accidentally aroused by three children's
amateur witchcraft.
/
A clay pipe and a pair of ancient spectacles,
dug up in James's garden, link him even
more closely to the ghost in The Ghost of
Thomas Kempe (Carnegie. Medal winner
1973). This clay pipe was dug up in
Penelope Lively's garden.

Humour
'I like the proposition of the impossible,
that kind of dottiness. The book I'm
working on at the moment is like that. It's
about a housing estate built on the site of
an eighteenth-century picturesque landscape
with a park and house — it's a Stourhead
kind of place. It's been destroyed for ages,
the house has burned down, the landscape
has vanished. Then it starts coming up again
through the estate, growing up through it
owing to the machinations of the landscape
gardener (a kind of Humphrey Repton
figure). I'm having a lot of fun with
greenhouses that turn into classical temples.
It's considerably wilder than Thomas
' Kempe. I hope it's going to be funny.'
She also enjoys satire — 'but there's a way
in which you can be more consciously
satirical in an adult novel. You can be
sharper, crueller, the claws can be put out a
bit further. I suppose QV66 is the nearest
I've come to satire in a children's book.'

The Voyage of QV66
'I felt I'd written a lot in a short time. I was
worried that perhaps I might be beginning
to write the same book again and again. I'm
not entirely sure now that that's a bad
thing. Some people always write the same
book; they just do it better and better. But
I wanted to do something utterly different.
Writing about animals is a splendid way of
writing about people. Why not have a go?'
There was a memory of a barge seen on the
Thames in London. 'I remember thinking
for no reason at all, if you wanted to you
could get a cow and a horse on that. It
didn't occur to me that that might be of any
significance but when I started looking for
the book, as it were, the whole thing drifted
back into my head.'
The book was a chance to have a bit of fun
in all sorts of directions — Stanley is the
archetypal child, Freda the archetypal
parent — the fun is at the expense of both.
Stanley is every little boy I've ever known —
every person even. He's supposed to
incorporate all human virtues and vices.
There's a lot of me in Stanley. I got much
involved with him.'
Her son Adam also got involved with the
book. Every day after school he wanted a
progress report. 'At one stage he said,
"There's something missing — it needs
another character." What character? "A
parrot.'" And so the Major was created and
the book was dedicated to Adam.
What about the end? 'I knew it was going to
end in the zoo but I wasn't quite sure how.
So I went to London Zoo on a March day to
watch monkeys — an afternoon of seeing
what they all did just wrote the last
chapter.' The crew of QV66 sailed off down
the Thames because 'I imagined there might
be a sequel but it has never come off. I've
started writing it but I can't get it off the
ground.'

PPenelope Lively has published two novels>
The Road to Lichf ield and Treasures of
Time, and a volume of short stories for
adults. 'I needed a, change. I'm a restless
writer — I like to move around from one
kind of thing to another.' She doesn't see
writing for adults as a progression from
writing for children. 'People underestimate
children massively. The kind of things I
wanted to explore in The Road to Lichfield
would not necessarily be difficult for
children —but rather mysterious without
being intriguingly mysterious. The more I
thought, the more I realised this was going
to be an adult novel.'
She is fascinated by the short story as a
form and sees many connections with
children's books. She is also pleased when
reviewers of her adult novels refer to the
books for children.
Penelope Lively meets her public, children
and adults, quite often. They always ask,
"Where do your ideas come from?" What
I've seen and heard, how people behave,
how I behave myself, from books. Children
see this as cheating. It's difficult to explain.
Constant reading is absolutely essential — a
roaming around kind of reading. When
you're working on an idea for a book,
there's a wonderful sense that everything
you see or hear will be in some eerie way
relevant to it, suddenly give you further
ideas, and everything that you read will feed
it in some way.

FWIW, my favourites of hers are:
The Wild Hunt of Hagworthy
The House in Norham Gardens
The Driftway
The Revenge of Samuel Stokes
Astercote
The Ghost of Thomas Kempe

And I was surprisingly underwhelmed by:
A Stitch in Time - which won the Whitbread?!
The Whispering Knights - you'd think it'd be my fav, but no

And I disliked:
The Voyage of QV66

I like her books also!

My favourite book by Lively is The Revenge of Samuel Stokes which is absolutely hilarious. The House in Norham Gardens is one I also like very much.

I've always wanted to like her books more than I end up doing....

Charlotte wrote: "I've always wanted to like her books more than I end up doing...."

I hate that feeling. :) I know it well - not with Lively for me. Cresswell springs to mind!

Oooooo, Cresswell! Goddess! But not always.

XD