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Published: March 28, 2011
Diana Wynne Jones, whose critically admired stories and novels for children and teenage readers imagined fantastical worlds inhabited by wizards, witches, magicians and ordinary boys and girls, died on Saturday in Bristol, England. She was 76.
The cause was cancer, Sandee Roston, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins Children’s Books, Ms. Jones’s publisher, said in an e-mail message.
Though she never became the household name in the United States that J. K. Rowling did with the Harry Potter franchise, Ms. Jones’s work was especially relished by connoisseurs of the young-adult fantasy and science fiction genres. She wrote more than 35 books, including the Chrestomanci series, which focuses on a powerful enchanter who presides over a world in which magic is, in her words, “as common as music.” Another popular book, “Howl’s Moving Castle” (1986), about a young girl transformed into an old crone by a spiteful witch, was adapted into a 2004 animated film.
Her books, which draw on Norse and other mythologies, created generally recognizable worlds except for the ubiquity of spells, trances and hocus-pocus. Her protagonists were generally clever and curious children whose cleverness and curiosity became terrifically useful as they wended their way through convoluted adventures, mostly unaided by the adults in their lives, who routinely disappointed them. Her prose was literate and sonorous, and she wrote with what sounded like an arched eyebrow - perfect for the skeptically wise young person who was her ideal reader.
“Jones’s fiction is relevant, subversive, witty and highly enjoyable, while also having a distinctly dark streak and a constant awareness of how unreliable the real world can seem,” the British critic Christopher Priest wrote in The Guardian of London this week. “Disguises and deceptions abound. Though avoiding criminally dysfunctional families or unwanted pregnancies, her cleverly plotted and amusing adventures deal frankly with emotional clumsiness, parental neglect, jealousy between siblings and a general sense of being an outcast. Rather than a deliberately cruel stepmother, a Jones protagonist might have a real mother far more wrapped up in her own career than in the discoveries and feelings of her child. The child protagonist would realize this, but get on with the adventure anyway.”
Ms. Jones was born in London on Aug. 16, 1934. Her family moved a great deal when she was a child, especially after the onset of World War II. She spent time in Wales, where her father was from, and the family eventually settled in Thaxted, a village in Essex, where her parents ran a cultural center for local teenagers.
As Ms. Jones described them, her parents were distant, chilly people, miserly and neglectful, and perhaps that is where the self-reliance and sense that life must proceed in spite of obstacles manifested in her characters was born. In any case, her powers of observation emerged as acute, somewhat critical and wryly mischievous. In an autobiographical essay, she described childhood encounters with two giants of children’s literature, Arthur Ransome and Beatrix Potter, and concluded that they both hated children. Of the community in Thaxted, she wrote, “This idyllic place had the highest illegitimate birth rate in the county.”
“In numerous families, the younger apparent brothers or sisters turned out to be the offspring of the unmarried elder daughters,” she continued, adding that there was one young woman who pretended her daughter was her sister, “and there was a fair deal of incest, too. Improbable characters abounded there, including two acknowledged witches and a man who went mad in the church porch at full moon.”
Ms. Jones graduated from St. Anne’s College, Oxford. She married a university professor, John A. Burrow, and began writing children’s books because the ones she was reading to her own children displeased her. Her skeptical outlook extended to the genre of fiction in which she wrote, and in 1996 she published “The Tough Guide to Fantasyland,” a spoof, in the form of a guidebook, of the entire universe of fantasy novels and their too-often-shared conventions.
In addition to the Chrestomanci books - including “Charmed Life” (1977), “The Magicians of Caprona” (1980) and “Witch Week” (1982) - Ms. Jones wrote another series set in a medieval-like seacoast civilization, known as the Dalemark quartet - including “Cart and Cwidder,” “Drowned Ammett,” “The Spellcoats” and “The Crown of Dalemark.” Her recent titles include “The Merlin Conspiracy” (2003), about three young people who manage to foil a plot to seize control of the magic of the universe, and “The Game” (2007), about children venturing into an alternate world known as the mythosphere. A new book, “Earwig and the Witch,” is to be published next year.
Ms. Jones’s survivors include her husband, whom she married in 1956; three sons, Richard, Colin and Michael; and five grandchildren.
Diana Wynne Jones, whose critically admired stories and novels for children and teenage readers imagined fantastical worlds inhabited by wizards, witches, magicians and ordinary boys and girls, died on Saturday in Bristol, England. She was 76.
The cause was cancer, Sandee Roston, a spokeswoman for HarperCollins Children’s Books, Ms. Jones’s publisher, said in an e-mail message.
Though she never became the household name in the United States that J. K. Rowling did with the Harry Potter franchise, Ms. Jones’s work was especially relished by connoisseurs of the young-adult fantasy and science fiction genres. She wrote more than 35 books, including the Chrestomanci series, which focuses on a powerful enchanter who presides over a world in which magic is, in her words, “as common as music.” Another popular book, “Howl’s Moving Castle” (1986), about a young girl transformed into an old crone by a spiteful witch, was adapted into a 2004 animated film.
Her books, which draw on Norse and other mythologies, created generally recognizable worlds except for the ubiquity of spells, trances and hocus-pocus. Her protagonists were generally clever and curious children whose cleverness and curiosity became terrifically useful as they wended their way through convoluted adventures, mostly unaided by the adults in their lives, who routinely disappointed them. Her prose was literate and sonorous, and she wrote with what sounded like an arched eyebrow - perfect for the skeptically wise young person who was her ideal reader.
“Jones’s fiction is relevant, subversive, witty and highly enjoyable, while also having a distinctly dark streak and a constant awareness of how unreliable the real world can seem,” the British critic Christopher Priest wrote in The Guardian of London this week. “Disguises and deceptions abound. Though avoiding criminally dysfunctional families or unwanted pregnancies, her cleverly plotted and amusing adventures deal frankly with emotional clumsiness, parental neglect, jealousy between siblings and a general sense of being an outcast. Rather than a deliberately cruel stepmother, a Jones protagonist might have a real mother far more wrapped up in her own career than in the discoveries and feelings of her child. The child protagonist would realize this, but get on with the adventure anyway.”
Ms. Jones was born in London on Aug. 16, 1934. Her family moved a great deal when she was a child, especially after the onset of World War II. She spent time in Wales, where her father was from, and the family eventually settled in Thaxted, a village in Essex, where her parents ran a cultural center for local teenagers.
As Ms. Jones described them, her parents were distant, chilly people, miserly and neglectful, and perhaps that is where the self-reliance and sense that life must proceed in spite of obstacles manifested in her characters was born. In any case, her powers of observation emerged as acute, somewhat critical and wryly mischievous. In an autobiographical essay, she described childhood encounters with two giants of children’s literature, Arthur Ransome and Beatrix Potter, and concluded that they both hated children. Of the community in Thaxted, she wrote, “This idyllic place had the highest illegitimate birth rate in the county.”
“In numerous families, the younger apparent brothers or sisters turned out to be the offspring of the unmarried elder daughters,” she continued, adding that there was one young woman who pretended her daughter was her sister, “and there was a fair deal of incest, too. Improbable characters abounded there, including two acknowledged witches and a man who went mad in the church porch at full moon.”
Ms. Jones graduated from St. Anne’s College, Oxford. She married a university professor, John A. Burrow, and began writing children’s books because the ones she was reading to her own children displeased her. Her skeptical outlook extended to the genre of fiction in which she wrote, and in 1996 she published “The Tough Guide to Fantasyland,” a spoof, in the form of a guidebook, of the entire universe of fantasy novels and their too-often-shared conventions.
In addition to the Chrestomanci books - including “Charmed Life” (1977), “The Magicians of Caprona” (1980) and “Witch Week” (1982) - Ms. Jones wrote another series set in a medieval-like seacoast civilization, known as the Dalemark quartet - including “Cart and Cwidder,” “Drowned Ammett,” “The Spellcoats” and “The Crown of Dalemark.” Her recent titles include “The Merlin Conspiracy” (2003), about three young people who manage to foil a plot to seize control of the magic of the universe, and “The Game” (2007), about children venturing into an alternate world known as the mythosphere. A new book, “Earwig and the Witch,” is to be published next year.
Ms. Jones’s survivors include her husband, whom she married in 1956; three sons, Richard, Colin and Michael; and five grandchildren.