Green Knowe

Green Knowe is a series of six children's novels written by Lucy M. Boston, illustrated by her son Peter Boston, and published from 1954 to 1976. It features a very old house, Green Knowe, based on Boston's home at the time, The Manor in Hemingford Grey, Huntingdonshire. In the novels she brings to life the people she imagines might have lived there.

For the fourth book in the series, A Stranger at Green Knowe (1961), Boston won the annual Carnegie Medal, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject. She was a commended runner up for both the first and second books.

Some of the stories feature Toseland, a boy called Tolly for short, and his great-grandmother Mrs. Oldknow. Green Knowe is inhabited by the spirits of people who lived there in ages past, and more than one of the spirits Tolly knows as children later grow into adults. Other supernatural entities in the series include the children's dog, Orlando; demonic tree-spirit, Green Noah (manifesting as a large tree on the grounds of the manor house); and an animated statue of St. Christopher.

Faber and Faber published the first five books, 1954 to 1964. In the U.S., Harcourt published them, the first in 1955 and the others within the calendar year of British publication. The last book appeared after more than a decade, published by The Bodley Head and Atheneum Books in 1976.

Lucy M. Boston also published one Green Knowe short story, "Demon at Green Knowe" (1964), which was compiled in Spook, Spooks, Spooks (1966).

WorldCat reports that the six Green Knowe novels are Boston's works most widely held by participating libraries, by a wide margin.

The Children of Green Knowe, the first of Boston's six books about the fictional manor house, Green Knowe, was a commended runner up for the 1954 Carnegie Medal. The novel concerns the visit of a young boy, Toseland, to the magical house, Green Knowe. The house is tremendously old, dating from the Norman Conquest, and has been continually inhabited by Toseland's ancestors, the d'Aulneaux family, later called Oldknowe or Oldknow. Toseland crosses floodwaters by night to reach the house, to spend the Christmas holidays with his great-grandmother, Linnet Oldknow, who addresses him as "Tolly".

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