Description

Published 1951: First Edition / Hardcover / Very Good Condition / Illustrated throughout

Original green pictorial cloth with green titles on the cover and spine and original pictorial dust jacket. 158 very clean and bright pages. Boards slightly rubbed with time. The dust jacket is slightly rubbed and faded with time and chipped along the edges consistent with age but remains intact. Scarce! (HQ824)

Postage €6.95 including any additional books ordered
An Post prepaid postage envelopes within the Republic of Ireland, with no weight restrictions from €6.95

There were only five published in this country. In order of publication they are: Susanna Campaigns (1951), Felicity and the Secret Papers (1952), both published by Blackie; Annabel and Bryony (1953), published by Oxford University Press; Simona's Jewel (1954) and Two of Red and Two of Blue (1955), both published by Lutterworth Press. This last I only happened upon in 1963 when I was in the children's section of the public library, getting a book for my daughter (truly!); and Felicity and the Secret Papers I read only very recently when I acquired a reader's ticket for the British Library. So I was never the age (ten up) for which the books were intended. One other book, The Midshipman and the Rajah, came out in the United States in 1963 but this I knew nothing about until I got in touch with Marjorie Phillips herself, thanks to Lutterworth who gave me her last known address.

Born in 1910, with an English father and a Welsh mother, Marjorie Phillips lived in the Wirral as a child, married, spent the war on Merseyside, and began to write down the stories she told to her children when, after the war, she and her husband bought a small hill farm in Wales.

She says: 'It was glorious but we couldn't make a decent living so we gave it up (with tears) and resumed our former occupations.' (Mr Phillips was a Works Chemist, she took a local government job in Ruthin.) They bought a bungalow in the Clwdd valley between Ruthin and Denbigh, where she still lives.

Of the five books published in Britain, three are historical. Susanna Campaigns is set in England in 1708, Simona's Jewel in the imaginary Italian duchy of Montefiore in 1515, and Two of Red and Two of Blue in a country resembling northern Italy in an unspecified late medieval or early Renaissance period. The other two are contemporary. Felicity and the Secret Papers is an adventure with industrial spies, but Annabel and Bryony is a fantasy. It bears a (very distant) likeness to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a likeness deliberately heightened, I suspect, by Oxford University Press, who asked Pauline Baynes to do the excellent illustrations.

All Marjorie Phillips' books have in common a preoccupation with honour and the niceties of conscience which Violet Needham would certainly have found sympathetic. Google Books..