Chronicles of Narnia - POLL

16 “canonic” british authors active 40s-60s who don’t fit that template

joan aiken
pauline clarke
roald dahl
leon garfield
alan garner
eric linklater
mary norton
sheena porter
arthur ransome
ian serraillier
catherine storr
rosemary sutcliffe
john rowe townsend
geoffrey trease
henry treece
t.h.white

(excluding john christopher and peter dickinson as they don’t start till the late 60s so count more as a bookend)

2 who kinda do fit that template

lucy m. boston (this is who you mainly have in mind guess)
philippa pearce (not very like boston, and also just one book of several not in template)

I never read the flambards books, maybe they fit too

none of them count

(I'm being silly, you're right of course)

lol yes, i just got into it bcz i think it's an interesting issue! CSL *does* kinda stick out in this company, i think his sensibility was formed decades before most of those other guys

(tolk's too, though he's always a bit of a special case) (like denys watkins-pitchford didn't spend 20 years proving the the little grey men with not one but three languages alphabets and names of months etc)

This thread revive lead me to read the Wiki entry on Pauline Baynes. Didn't know before that Lewis (who does not come out of this well) privately expressed severe reservations about her work, particularly in a letter to Dorothy L Sayers:

Lewis gave his fullest account of his opinion of Baynes in a letter that he wrote to his friend Dorothy L. Sayers on 5 August 1955. "The main trouble about Pauline B. is [...] her total ignorance of animal anatomy. In the v. last book [the fifth in the series] she has at last learned how to draw a horse. I have always had serious reservations about her [...]. But she had merits (her botanical forms are lovely), she needed the work (old mother to support, I think), and worst of all she is such a timid creature, so 'easily put down' that criticism cd. only be hinted [...]. At any real reprimand she'd have thrown up the job, not in a huff but in sheer, downright, unresenting, pusillanimous dejection. She is quite a good artist on a certain formal-fantastic level (did Tolkien's Farmer Giles far better than my books) but has no interest in matter – how boats are rowed, or bows shot with, or feet planted, or fists clenched. Arabesque is really her vocation."

Hideous sexism aside, I ... sort of agree with Lewis - or rather, I really like her colour cover paintings, but find her interior line drawings a bit stiff and really quite unattractive.

it's odd given the mode of baynes's illustrations for farmer giles of ham -- which are witty and stylised and pull in the bayeux tapestry and the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts, and medieval illustration generally, and in 1948 she's drawing horses (there are plenty in and around ham) perfectly well -- that she was then bundled into an approach that worked much less well for her in the CSL books (1950-56)? like the image of the children all tumbling out of the wardrobe at the end of tLtWatW: it's inept goofiness is actually kind of engaging, but it's objectively not good realism!!

a book baynes worked on that i loooove is amabel williams-ellis's* fairytales of the british isles (1960)

meet beelzebub!
https://www.paulinebaynes.com/_gallery_images/fiomiz57w95o.jpg

*married to the architect who designed portmeirion

really good revive this! and tho mark is obv absolutely right, i totally saw where f.hazel was coming from, and I was trying to work out why.

I think in my v uncategorised childhood mind (not recognising these come from different periods and strands), Tom's Midnight Garden, The Secret Garden, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Five Children and It, The Box of Delights and The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (and a number of others eg Over Sea, Under Stone) were quite similar. all involve displacement through illness, war, parental absence and the discovery of magic of some form (the form is important though: myth, ghosts, ancient immanent magic.

The city/pastoral division is probably important (puck and a midsummer night's dream is really not very far away in some of these). Purely mechanically it gives the child or children somewhere to explore and time on your hands to do it.