![]() ![]() "I started writing children's books when we moved to a village in Essex where there were almost no books. It struck me then that the Great were remarkably touchy and unpleasant (even if, in Ruskin's case, it was posthumous), and I thought I would like to be the same, without the unpleasantness. ![]() So likewise did Beatrix Potter, who lived nearby. ![]() Soon after, we children offended Arthur Ransome by making a noise on the shore beside his houseboat. ![]() One day, finding I had no paper to draw on, I stole from the attic a stack of exquisite flower-drawings, almost certainly by Ruskin himself, and proceeded to rub them out. The house we were in had belonged to Ruskin's secretary and had also been the home of the children in the books of Arthur Ransome. I think this ambition was fired-or perhaps exacerbated is a better word-by early marginal contacts with the Great, when we were evacuated to the English Lakes during the war. "I decided to be a writer at the age of eight, but I did not receive any encouragement in this ambition until thirty years later. They have three sons and two granddaughters. Jones lives in Bristol, England, with her husband, a professor of English at Bristol University. She has been a compulsive storyteller for as long as she can remember enjoying most ardently those tales dealing with witches, hobgoblins, and the like. Diana Wynne Jones was raised in the village of Thaxted, in Essex, England. ![]()
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