[In 1936 came Ballet Shoes,] a children's book still loved nearly two generations later, in which [Streatfeild's] gift for immediacy and solidity was used to the full…. There was an exactly reproduced copy in it of the form needed by a twelve-year-old going on the stage, filled in for the eldest of its three heroines. There was talk about money and the exact cost of clothes for auditions, about the impossibility of paying school fees …, rooms were let to make ends meet, Nanny took a cut in wages. It was admitted that looks were a thing that counted, even at twelve. This was stark realism in the children's book world of those days, steeped in its [Arthur] Ransome, always on holiday and horseback….

[Streatfeild] simply wrote, without theories, because she had children's stories to tell, a publisher who guessed this and urged her to write them, and a child...