Sedbergh Festival of Books & Drama 2009

Denis Judd is Alison Uttley’s authorised biographer (“Alison Uttley: The life of a country child”) and has now edited Uttley’s diaries. Marking the 125th anniversary of her birth, the publication of the Dairies will provide an excellent opportunity to reassess the literary reputation one of the most remarkable of British writers for both children and adults. The Diaries do not merely lay bare the creative inner world of a prodigiously gifted and productive writer, but also chart the highs and lows of her personal life as well as providing a wonderfully readable record of nearly 40 years of British history.

Fifty years ago Alison Uttley established herself as one of the best–loved and best–selling writers for children, creating animal characters including Little Grey Rabbit, Squirrel and Hare. Her life was a remarkable progress from childhood idyll in Derbyshire to a prosperous and celebrated old age in suburban Buckinghamshire. It encompassed strange contrasts. She graduated in physics from Manchester University, but she also believed in fairies. She was an Edwardian suffragette, and a loving wife, mother and friend whose relationships were often stormy and sometimes downright destructive; her husband drowned himself before she had been able fully to establish herself as a writer – a tragedy from which she never fully recovered. She was extraordinarily gifted but also very complicated.