Noel Streatfeild's position in the children's book world is unique. She has had all the accolades…. Her first children's book, which has withstood the passage of time extraordinarily well, was published in 1936, the very year when the Carnegie Medal, that symbol of a new attitude towards literature for children, was first awarded. Miss Streatfeild herself has had a good deal to do with the changing attitude, and if, over this long span of time, her books have shown talent rather than genius, this does not trouble her child readers. It is we, the adults, who nowadays prefer fiction for children to be stronger and less predictable.

And Miss Streatfeild's subject-matter is easily despised. Her children belong mostly to the educated if impoverished middle classes and "the careers she writes about have tended rather to be the glamorous, wish-fulfilling king", as John Rowe Townsend once observed rather chillingly. Even...