Everything about Philippa Pearce totally explained
Ann Philippa Pearce OBE (b.
Great Shelford,
Cambridgeshire,
23 January 1920; d.
Durham,
21 December 2006) was an
English children's author.
Born in
1920, the youngest of four children, she was brought up in the Mill House in the village of
Great Shelford,
Cambridgeshire. Starting school late at the age of eight because of illness, she went to the
Perse School for Girls,
Cambridge, and went on to
Girton College,
Cambridge, after winning scholarship to read English and History there.
After gaining her degree, she left university and moved to
London were she found work as a
civil servant before beginning to write and produce
schools
radio programmes for the
BBC, where she remained for thirteen years. From
1958 to
1960 she was children’s editor at the
Oxford University Press and then,
1960 to
1967 at the
Andre Deutsch publishing house.
She married Martin Christie in
1962, who never having fully recovered from being a Japanese
prisoner of war, died two years later, shortly after the birth of their only child,
Sally, who was to become a children's author herself. From
1973 until she died from complications of a stroke in
2006, the author lived once again in
Great Shelford, down the same lane where she was brought up.
Writing career
In
1951 she spent a long while in hospital, recovering from
tuberculosis; during this stay she passed the time thinking about a canoe trip she'd taken many years before. This was the inspiration for her first
book,
Minnow on the Say, published in
1955. Like several of her subsequent books, it was inspired very clearly by the area where she'd been raised, with the villages of Great and
Little Shelford becoming Great and Little Barley, Cambridge becoming "Castleford" (nothing to do with the real town of the same name in West Yorkshire) and losing its university, and the
River Cam becoming the River Say.
Her next and most famous book,
Tom's Midnight Garden (
1958), has become one of the classic "time stories," inspiring a
film, a
stage play, and three
TV versions. It was awarded the
Carnegie Medal in
1959. The "midnight garden" was, in fact, based directly on the garden of the Mill House where she'd grown up. She wrote over 30 books, including
A Dog So Small (
1962),
The Battle of Bubble and Squeak (
1978) and
The Way To Sattin Shore (
1983).
The Battle of Bubble and Squeak inspired a two part television adaptation in Channel 4's
Talk, Write and Read series of educational programming.
Although not a prolific author of full-length books, Philippa Pearce continued to work over the decades, speaking at
conferences, editing
anthologies and writing
short stories, as well as attending a reception for children's authors at Number
10 Downing Street – the London home of the
British Prime Minister – in
2002.
In
2004 she published her first new full-length book for two decades,
The Little Gentleman.
Further Information
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