This morning's Guardian carries an obituary of the children's writer Philippa Pearce, who died just before Christmas. It turns out that the Independent carried a rather better obituary at the time.Pearce was one of the most important figures of what has been called the second Golden Age of English children's literature. This occupied, I suppose, the second half of the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s.
Her most celebrated book is Tom's Midnight Garden, though I was always fond of the earlier Minnow on the Say, even if I was never quite able to understand the ending. Did they find the treasure or not?
Certainly, Pearce contributed more to the good of mankind than Lord Lambton, whose Guardian obituary appears alongside hers.
Glad you've written about Philippa Pearce too - a shame if she just quietly disappears when she wrote such lovely stuff. I hadn't seen the Independent obituary, but will go and look at it.
ReplyDeleteOddly, neither mentions that "Minnow on the Say" was dramatised by the BBC in the 1970s as "Treasure Over the Water," one of the best such dramatisations of that era.
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