Lucy M. Boston is one of the most remarkable children's writers of the twentieth century. In 1954, when she was sixty-two, she published Yew Hall, a realistic novel for adults, and The Children of Green Knowe, a fantasy for children. Unlike such well-known British children's writers as Kenneth Grahame or her contemporary Mary Norton, she did not draw on memories of the people, places, or events of her childhood for her children's books. Instead, she used the Manor at Hemingford Grey, a place she had purchased as a middle-aged divorcée with a grown son, as her principal setting, and cast herself, fictionally altered, as the central adult character of the book, Great-grandmother Oldknow. When Boston wrote The Children of Green Knowe, she had no intention of creating more stories about the house. However, during the next twenty-two years she wrote five other novels about Green Knowe, establishing...