Person:Barbara Willard (2)

'Barbara Willard; Obituary.(Features).' The Times (London, England) (Feb 24, 1994): 19. InfoTrac Custom Newspapers. Thomson Gale. Grand Rapids Christian HS. 19 October 2005.

Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1994 The Times Barbara Mary Willard, author, died on February 18 aged 84. She was born at Hove on March 12, 1909.

AWFUL RUBBISH, said Barbara Willard once, talking about the novels that she wrote during the 1930s. A harsh judgment for, although they were romantic stories of their time, they showed from the start a dedication to the craft of writing which was to be the hallmark of her life.She was born the daughter of an actor and had what she called a sketchy education at the Convent of La Sainte Union at Southampton. This was combined with some acting she once played a boy in a production of Macbeth at Stratford-upon-Avon but, after tentative steps towards a theatrical career, she turned to her chief love, writing, and began to work on novels, short stories, and on production scripts for films. This last experience was of use during the Second World War, when she and her life-long companion, Frances Howell, became readers and script editors for 20th Century Fox.After the war Willard published several more novels and some stories for children about the Pennithorne family and their obdurate caravan, and this led to her work being brought to the notice of a perceptive editor, Grace Hogarth, who was establishing a new children's list atConstable. With Hogarth's encouragement, she wrote The House with Roots (1959) and so discovered that writing for children was, for her, the most satisfying medium for her talents.For the next ten years, Barbara Willard devoted herself assiduously to mastering that most difficult of arts. She developed the techniques for writing simple stories for younger readers (she had a gift here for finding her way into the erratic minds of small boys) and more complex stories for nearteenagers.Many of these focused on contemporary domestic crises: a house to be pulled down for a new road in The House with Roots, an orphan discovering her gifts in Charity at Home (1965). The treatment of these themes was not politicised in a way that has become fashionabletoday, but was used to explore the relationships between characters. The people in her stories always came first:

It is quite possible, she wrote, to start writing on the first page knowing practically nothing about what is to happen so long as you know whom it will happen to...This emphasis on characterisation was wedded to an ambitious realisation of narrative in her greatest work: the Mantlemass saga, which began with The Lark and the Laurel in 1970. She had shown a capacity for fashioning historical stories in her early book, Son of Charlemagne (1959) and had achieved a notable success in the genre with The Grove of Green Holly (1967), a tale of actors in the hard times of the Commonwealth period. That book, whose ending was set in the Ashdown Forest, was a direct inspiration to Mantlemass which followed the fortunes of a forest family over five generations and seven books, from Bosworth to the Great Rebellion.Barbara Willard claimed to be no researcher in an academic sense. I fumble and bumble over a lot of unprofitable ground, she once wrote, but writing Mantlemass came to preoccupy her so intensely that her wide reading was absorbed into an historical epic of great conviction.Part of the reason for this was the Ashdown Forest setting itself, for which she had an abiding love. She was delighted to discover during her researches that there had actually been a forest ironmaster called Willard. She lived for many years in a cottage on the edge of Ashdown, where she became a passionate gardener. She was also a member of the Board of Forest Conservators and wrote several books celebrating the English countryside and Sussex in particular. Her preoccupation with Mantlemass later led her to publish two further fictions, filling out parts of the original sequence, and in recent years she had gone on to publish other stories set in Ashdown: The Queen of the Pharisees' Children (1983) which won the Whitbread Children's Book Award, and The Ranger's Daughters (1992).In the years before she began to suffer from failing eyesight, she was keen on cars and driving and wrote, with Frances Howell, The Junior Motorist; The Driver's Apprentice (1969). She also liked to visit schools and libraries to talk to children about her work, and something of her zest for the whole genre of children's literature came through in the hilarities of Hullabaloo!, illustrated by Fritz Wegner (1969), one of the best anthologies of children's stories ever published.

Copyright (C) The Times, 1994

Document Number:CJ115776163

1.   Barbara Willard, in Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia.