Lucy M. Boston

Lucy M. Boston (1892–1990), born Lucy Maria Wood, was an English novelist who wrote for children and adults, publishing her work entirely after the age of 60. She is best known for her "Green Knowe" series: six low fantasy children's novels published by Faber between 1954 and 1976. The setting is Green Knowe, an old country manor house based on Boston's Cambridgeshire home at Hemingford Grey. For the fourth book in the series, A Stranger at Green Knowe (1961), she won the annual Carnegie Medal from the Library Association, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject.

During her long life, she distinguished herself as a writer, mainly of children’s books, and as the creator of a magical garden. She was also an accomplished artist who had studied drawing and painting in Vienna, and a needlewoman who produced a series of patchworks.

Lucy Wood was born in Southport, Lancashire, on 10 December 1892, the fifth of six children of James Wood, engineer and sometime Mayor of Stockport, and Mary Garrett. She had two older brothers, two older sisters and a younger brother. In her memoir, Perverse and Foolish, she describes life in a typically solid and affluent middle class Victorian family of committed Wesleyans. Her father was "eccentric with big ideas, a small, good-humoured, dynamic man", to whom it was said she bore a striking resemblance. She was also said to be his favourite and she clearly loved and admired him.

Lucy’s father was already 40 when he married her mother, who was half his age and the daughter of a Wesleyan minister. It was not, Lucy tells us, a love-match but one made under pressure from her mother’s family, since they had seven daughters. Her mother is described as "delicate, intensely sensitive, and without a trace of sensuous feeling." "She bore, as Victorian wives had to, a child every year, but had little maternal feeling." Lucy adds: "She should have been a nun. She was very gentle." Her mother’s religious beliefs were rigid and she held that every word of scripture was literally true.

...
Wikipedia