Mrs Molesworth may be unknown now but she was once an enormously popular and best-selling author. The poet Swinburne wrote: I tried to read The Cuckoo Clock, which has recently been re-issued in paperback, on two levels.
Tell Me a Story - Mrs. Molesworth - Google Книги
I knew I would like it - but what about the average primary school pupil? Sometimes it's a struggle to get a modern child to open the Alice books or Little Women, let alone lesser-known titles.
First published in , The Cuckoo Clock is obviously an old-fashioned story, a charming fairytale about a child called Griselda sent to live in a very, very old house with two very, very old aunts and their very, very old servant. Their advanced age is constantly emphasised but I have an uneasy feeling these three women are about my age. Griselda is lonely and bored but the cuckoo in the old cuckoo clock is magic and takes her on various gentle, girlish adventures - to Butterflyland and the Other Side of the Moon. Griselda eventually finds a real child friend and the cuckoo tactfully flies back to his clock.
He's a strict and bossy little bird, maybe an ancestor of E Nesbit's Psammead sand fairy. Nesbit was apparently a fervent admirer of The Cuckoo Clock. Mrs Molesworth lacks E Nesbit's crackle and spark, but she has her own particular charm which might beguile a book-orientated child.
She writes in a clear, simple style that still reads easily nowadays. Modern children will be astonished at the standard of behaviour expected of Griselda.
She has been called "the Jane Austen of the nursery," while The Carved Lions "is probably her masterpiece. Mary Louisa Molesworth typified late Victorian writing for girls. The girls reading Molesworth would grow up to be mothers; thus, the books emphasized Victorian notions of duty and self-sacrifice.
Typical of the time, her young child characters often use a lisping style, and words may be misspelt to represent children's speech—"jography" for geography, for instance. She took an interest in supernatural fiction.
Stream audiobook and download chapters
In , she published a collection of supernatural tales under the title Four Ghost Stories, and in a similar collection of six tales under the title Uncanny Stories. In addition to those, her volume Studies and Stories includes a ghost story entitled "Old Gervais" and her Summer Stories for Boys and Girls includes "Not exactly a ghost story. She died in and is buried in Brompton Cemetery , London. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Account Options
The colloquial who's who: Retrieved 10 October Henry Cadwallader Adams R. Sowerby Millicent Sowerby John Tenniel.
- Dica trentatrè (Italian Edition)?
- Tell Me a Story by Mrs. Molesworth!
- See a Problem??
- Mary Louisa Molesworth - Wikipedia!
- Some Like It Hot.
- Mrs. Molesworth (Molesworth, Mrs., ) | The Online Books Page!
- Desnudando a Google: La inquietante realidad que no quieren que conozcas (Spanish Edition)!
List of 19th-century British children's literature titles.