A welcome reissue of an original and highly imaginative classic. Marianne is stuck in bed for six weeks following an illness. Seemingly with nothing to do, she is sure she’ll be terribly bored. But then she finds a special pencil in an old workbox she is sorting through and begins to draw. Soon Marianne finds that whatever she draws appears in her dreams and, excitingly if slightly frighteningly, the people and places begin to come alive. Soon Marianne has a whole new world and Mark, a special friend to play with.
Confined to her bed with an illness, she finds a pencil in her great-grandmother's workbox, but the house she draws is as unsatisfying as always - like a shaky doll's house with grass as unlike anything growing as ever. But that night, she dreams and re-discovers her drawing in a completely new world. Returning to this world night after night, Marianne encounters a strange but familiar boy and the house takes on an increasingly ominous significance for both of them.
Catherine Storr (1913-2001) was an English children's writer, best known for her novel Marianne Dreams and for the Clever Polly series. She was born in London, and attended St Paul's Girls' School, and went on to study English literature at Newnham College, Cambridge. She tried unsuccessfully to become a novelist but without giving up this ambition she studied medicine, qualifying as a doctor in 1944. She worked at the Middlesex Hospital. Afterwards, while regularly producing new children's books, she also worked as an editorial assistant for Penguin Books, from 1966 to the early seventies. She married in 1942 and had had three daughters. She divorced in 1970 and remarried the economist Lord Balogh (1905-1985).
You can read Julia Eccleshare's obituary to Catherine Storr here.
