Description

Published 1946: First Edition, Fifth Impression / Hardcover / Very Good Condition / Illustrated throughout

Original red cloth no jacket. 320 clean and bright unmarked pages. Boards are rubbed, faded and part stained with time but are intact. A scarce original publication.

Collection can be arranged by Appointment. Churchtown, Dublin 14

Postage service is also available.

Katharine Hull, born London, 18 July 1921, died November 1977
Pamela Whitlock, born Penang, Malaysia, 21 Mar 1920, died 3 June 1982

Katharine Hull and Pamela Whitlock went to St Mary’s Convent in Ascot, where they wrote their first book, at the ages of 14 and 15. Although at the same school, they were in different boarding houses, and did not meet properly until they were caught out in a rainstorm. Their first book - The Far Distant Oxus - was written in a strange turn and turn about fashion. Each wrote a chapter in turn until they finished, when they revised each other’s chapters. Despite this unusual genesis, the book does not read at all as if it was cobbled together: Arthur Ransome, to whom the girls send the book when they had finished it, took it to his own publishers, Jonathan Cape, saying: “I’ve got this year’s best children’s book under my arm.”

Escape to Persia
Published by Jonathan Cape.

About the same six children as Oxus, this one sees them
“at first in London with a well-meaning aunt. The Hunterly children
persuade her into a rash wager that the three of them cannot get
down to Exmoor by themselves. The feat is accomplished and
then their adventures really begin. This time it is spring, but the
Oxus still splashes down the falls below their hut in the wood,
and though Persia exists only for
a fortnight, every day brings
excitement.

Peran-Wisa is repaired; a canal is
dug; a strange tribe of pygmies
found spying and routed; and the
identity of the mysterious Maurice
is almost revealed. The holiday
ends with a grand ceremonial
banquet and the children who have
made the lands of the Far Distant
Oxus their special playground,
pledge themselves with a blood-rite
in their river. “