(It is quite a journey from Jeanne's bedroom down the long...)
It is quite a journey from Jeanne's bedroom down the long corridor, to the place fascinating to her since her babyhood: the room hung with tapestry - very old, and in some parts faded, but still distinct. Jeanne sees something strange in one tapestry, of a garden. Didn't those peacocks move, ever so slightly? Then Dudu, the family's raven, is at the window - but she just saw that decrepit old bird down on the terrace. Dudu cannot fly that fast! Now she hears wonderful news - her cousin Hugh is coming to stay. He will be like a little brother - and he will sleep in the tapestry room.
(This volume contains all thirteen of Molesworth's uncanny...)
This volume contains all thirteen of Molesworth's uncanny tales, in which the cosy world of middle-class Victorian domesticity is subject to ghostly incursions, and other unexplained phenomena. The collection also includes an additional story by Molesworth's son Bevil, who predeceased his mother at the tragically young age of twenty-seven.
Mary Louisa Molesworth or Mrs. Molesworth was one of the most popular and influential children's writers of her time. Her books were read by children around the world, and her fans included the Princess of Wales, who read Molesworth's books to her children. In addition to religious or moral tales, Molesworth wrote stories about the everyday lives of middle-class children as well as imaginative fantasies.
Background
Ethnicity:
Mary's father, Charles Augustus Stewart, was of Scottish descent.
Mary Louisa Molesworth was born as Mary Louisa Stewart on May 29, 1839 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, to a Scottish businessman Charles Augustus Stewart and his wife Agnes Janet Wilson. When she was about two years old, her family, which included two other sisters and three brothers, moved to Manchester, England; Molesworth grew up in that city and its suburbs.
Education
Molesworth was taught by her mother at home and attended a school in Switzerland. She was also instructed by the Reverend William Gaskell, the husband of Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, a popular English novelist who influenced writers such as George Eliot. Gaskell's credited with helping Molesworth to develop her literary style.
As a girl Molesworth visited her grandmother Mary Wilson, who was an accomplished storyteller, in Scotland each year. After Wilson's death in 1849 Molesworth took it upon herself to continue the storytelling tradition with her brothers and sisters. A voracious reader, Molesworth began to devise her own stories while still a child and began publishing some of them in magazines as a teenager.
Career
After the death of her daughter, Molesworth, under the pseudonym Ennis Graham - the name of a debased childhood friend - published a three-volume adult novel concerning marriage and the unhappiness that it sometimes causes. Molesworth wrote three novels before she and her husband received a legal separation in 1879. After the separation, she lived in France and Germany, where she translated French and German books and wrote essays before returning to England to settle permanently in 1883.
Although Molesworth had difficulties with her husband, she had a better relationship with her surviving children. She told them stories and read to them frequently. Molesworth began to write down some of her original tales and tried to gain an objective opinion about them from her children by slipping them between the covers of other books that she was reading aloud. Still, Molesworth did not think of publishing her children's stories until a friend, the artist Sir Noel Paton, suggested that she send some to the Publishing house of Macmillan, who purchased Molesworth's stories and published them in Tell Me a Story. This collection, which contains six stories, includes "Good-night, Winny." Another story from this collection, "The Reel Fairies," describes a girl who imagines that spools of thread become fairies and take her away to fairyland; however, at the end of the story, she becomes cross with the fairies and wants to return home. Molesworth based this character on herself as a child.
Molesworth's second published book for children, "Carrots: Just a Little Boy," was very popular during the late nineteenth century. In Carrots, red-headed Fabian, the new addition to a family of six children, learns about the world through the influence of his affectionate older sister Floss, a nurse, and an aunt. Fabian, who grows from infancy to school-age through the course of the book, is also told stories - both fairy tales and Biblical references - that are interspersed throughout the narrative.
Molesworth's next book, "The Cuckoo Clock," was also very popular. The story focuses on Griselda, a little girl whose mother has died and who has been sent to live with her two elderly aunts. Griselda is lonely, but she is soon befriended by a magical cuckoo from the clock in her aunts' home; the cuckoo acts as a teacher. Molesworth began to use her own name (for a second publication of The Cuckoo Clock) in 1877. She continued to write popular books for children, such as the fantasies The Tapestry Room and Christmas-Tree Land, and the realistic stories Christmas Child: A Sketch of a Boy-Life, the story of a boy who dies young and the only one of Molesworth's books to include the death of a child, The Adventures of Herr Baby, and Two Little Waifs.
One of Molesworth's most highly regarded works is The Carved Lions. The author based this book on her own childhood; in it, young Geraldine goes from a happy home in Manchester to the horrors of boarding school. After she runs away, she finds shelter in a shop where she meets the Carved Lions, who come to life in her dreams and help her come to cope with her problems.
Molesworth continued to write books for both children and adults into the twentieth century. In addition to the books, she published with Macmillan and other publishers. Molesworth wrote Bible stories and morality tales, many of which were published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. As a novelist and short-story writer for adults, Molesworth commented on the middle class of the late Victorian and early Edwardian period; she also published two collections of supernatural stories and several essays about children's literature and writing for children. Although Molesworth was respected as an adult writer, the popularity of her books for this audience was far surpassed by that of her stories for children. By the end of the nineteenth century, she had stopped writing for adults entirely.
Molesworth issued her last book for children in 1911 and in 1921, she died of heart failure.
Mary Louisa Molesworth was raised as a Calvinist in a strict religious environment.
Views
Molesworth had specific ideas about books for children. She thought that children's books should contain words that would force children to understand meaning through context and would strengthen vocabularies. She also believed that children, as characters, should be rendered in a realistic fashion, even if they were depicted in fantastic environments. Finally, Molesworth believed that children should read books that do not make them sad, but that also do not "deceive children about the sober concerns of the world."
Quotations:
"Troubles never come singly."
"Don't raise your expectations too high. It's the surest way of being disappointed."
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
Mary Louisa Molesworth died of heart failure.
Quotes from others about the person
Roger Lancelyn Green: "Mary Louisa Molesworth typified late Victorian writing for girls. Aimed at girls too old for fairies and princesses but too young for Austen and the Brontës, books by Molesworth had their share of amusement, but they also had a good deal of moral instruction. The girls reading Molesworth would grow up to be mothers; thus, the books emphasized Victorian notions of duty and self-sacrifice."
Connections
At twenty-one, Molesworth married Major Richard Molesworth of the Royal Dragoons. The couple had seven children, but their marriage was not a happy one. Richard Molesworth had been wounded in the head in the Crimea, and the shrapnel that remained in his head supposedly caused him to act violently. In addition, the couple's first daughter and son died. Molesworth and her husband received a legal separation in 1879.