Diana Wynne Jones

Author

• Born: August 16, 1934
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: March 26, 2011

Biography

Diana Wynne Jones was born in London on August 16, 1934. She and her sister Isobel, born in 1936, lived in Hadley Wood on the outskirts of London. In late August 1939, Jones and her sister were sent to stay with her grandparents in Wales, as the outbreak of World War II was expected—as was her second sister, Ursula, who was born soon after while Jones’s mother was en route to Wales.

Jones’s writing was deeply influenced by her time in Wales. She was educated at the local school, where everyone else was taught in Welsh, a language she did not understand. Her family returned to London before Christmas 1939, but the school she attended evacuated pupils to a house called Lane Head beside Coniston Water in Westmorland in the summer of 1940. Not all of her time spent there was pleasant. In September 1941, the family left for York, where they boarded in a nunnery and her mother was a teacher. They returned to Hadley Wood in 1942. Jones’s father was away most nights fire-watching, and on weekends he exercised with the Home Guard.

In 1943, Jones’s family moved to Thaxted in Essex, where her parents ran Clarance House, a cultural center for young adults. During this time, Jones and her sisters were frequently ignored by their parents, who were emotionally absent and physically neglectful. The girls were banished from the house and sent to live in a two-room shack across the yard, which had no washroom and only a single stove for heating. Soon after arriving in Thaxted, Jones contracted juvenile rheumatism, which seriously affected her heart. Ursula later suffered from the same ailment.

Jones was sent to a boarding school in Brentwood, but after a short time her parents withdrew her from the school and sent her to a Quaker school in Saffron Walden instead as day pupil, where she stayed from 1946 to 1952. She went to St. Anne’s College, Oxford, in 1953, where she attended lectures by C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. After her father’s death, her mother bought a private school in Beeston outside Nottingham, housed in what Jones described as “a very haunted house,” to which the family moved in 1956.

Jones married John A. Burrow three days before Christmas 1956. The couple lived in London until September 1957, when they returned to Oxford. They eventually had three sons. In 1966, the family moved briefly to Eynsham, where Jones wrote her only published adult novel, Changeover (1970). In 1967, the family rented a house from Jesus College, Oxford, where Burrow worked. Except for the year 1968 through 1969, which they spent at Yale University in the United States, they remained in that house until 1976. That year, they moved to the Clifton area of Bristol, and Burrow received an English professorship at Bristol University.

Jones was an avid reader and at the age of eight realized she was going to be a writer. Her writing career began with three plays produced in London between 1968 and 1971. Once her children were at school, Jones began writing seriously, with her first children’s book, Wilkins’ Tooth, appearing in 1973. She subsequently published nearly fifty books, ending with Enchanted Glass in 2010, the year before her death. In 1977, Jones won the Guardian Award for Children’s Books for her novel Charmed Life (1977). Her novel Dark Lord of Derkholm (1998) won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award in 1999. She won a Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor in 1984 for Archer’s Goon (1984), and again two years later for Howl’s Moving Castle (1986), which was turned into a Japanese animated movie in 2004 by filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. A version dubbed into English was released in the United States in 2005, with the voice of Howl performed by actor Christian Bale.

Jones died on March 26, 2011, from lung cancer, which she had been diagnosed with two years earlier. At the time of her death, she and her husband had three children and five grandchildren. Her novel Earwig and the Witch (2011) and her nonfiction essay collection Reflections: On the Magic of Writing (2012) were published posthumously. The Islands of Chaldea, a standalone novel left unfinished at Jones's death, was completed by her sister Ursula and was published in 2014.

Bibliography

Butler, Charlie. "Diana Wynne Jones: Doyenne of Fantasy Writers Whose Books for Children Paved the Way for J. K. Rowling." Independent. Independent.co.uk, 30 Mar. 2011. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.

Drew, Bernard A. The 100 Most Popular Young Adult Authors: Biographical Sketches and Bibliographies. Rev. 1st ed. Englewood: Libs. Unltd., 1997. Print.

Flood, Alison. "Diana Wynne Jones's Final Book Completed by Sister." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 24 June 2013. Web. 28 Mar. 2016.

Jones, Diana Wynne. Reflections: On the Magic of Writing. Fwd. Neil Gaiman. New York: Greenwillow, 2012. Print.

Mendlesohn, Farah. Diana Wynne Jones: Children's Literature and the Fantastic Tradition. New York: Routledge, 2005. Print.

Priest, Christopher. "Diana Wynne Jones Obituary." Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 27 Mar. 2011. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.

Weber, Bruce. "Diana Wynne Jones, Children's Author, Dies at 76." New York Times. New York Times, 28 Mar. 2011. Web. 11 Mar. 2016.