The Lion, the Witch and the Wonder, BBC Radio 4
Talking spiders and polite bears and very strong girls like Pippi Longstocking: welcome to the world of children’s books.
Katherine Rundell is passionate about them – she is a scholar of the Renaissance and she’s also a children’s writer.
This is a wonderful series of essays that looks back on the children’s books that formed us because, as she points out, those who write for children are also writing for adults.
Rundell has a wry eye and a sharp wit. In the very first stories, the horror of nose-picking was a great theme.
She points out that just because you’re a great writer doesn’t make you a great children’s writer.
Take Leo Tolstoy. His children’s stories have all the lightness and warmth you find in Anna Karenina’s suicide scene, she observed.
There’s a particular story about a lion and a puppy that ends up grizzly: “Roll up, roll up, children, for all the horror and grief you can eat!”
It’s Rundell’s love of children’s literature, and her knowledge worn lightly and with such wicked humour, that makes these essays unmissable.
She recommends Toni Morrison’s The Big Box, about a child locked with love into a beautifully furnished cardboard box.
Try James Joyce and James Baldwin, she urges us.
Joyce’s The Cat and the Devil, written for his grandson, is enough to single-handedly make you love him, she says. It sounds wickedly funny.
This is a lightning trip through all the great children’s writers – from AA Milne and his philosopher Pooh, to E Nesbit’s Railway Children.
She touches on how many stories concern orphans – children having to navigate the world on their own – and the fairy godfathers and mothers that come to their aid.
She talks about children bursting through looking glasses and wardrobes into Neverland and Wonderland and Narnia.
She touches on the Moomins, who are deeply, profoundly strange but everyone is welcome at their table.
Remember Little My – a lesson on how little girls don’t have to be sweet? Little My bites because she wants to.
Rundell makes an interesting point. She often visits schools where there are children of colour with English as a second language.
In their own stories, their heroes are called Elizabeth, Henry or Jack. Why?
More children must be able to find themselves shining in the books they read, she said. How wise. How true.