When I was a child, our local library had one corner devoted to what were called “Modern Fairy Tales.” That was the section I haunted, and I read books about magic over and over again, which is probably a strong factor in my growing up to become a Witch. Here are some of my personal favorites from childhood and later, with some commentary from my perpective today.
Frances Hodgson Burnett—The Secret Garden is now a popular movie, so this author has been introduced to a new generation of children. my personal favorite of hers, however, was The Little Princess. This somewhat masochistic tale of a young girl who loses her father, her wealth and her status gripped the imaginations of me and my (also fatherless) close friends, and we used to play for hours, exchanging the roles of brave Sara Crewe and mean Miss Minchin. Don’t do a Marxist class analysis on this one!
Susan Cooper—The Dark is Rising series, Athenum Press, 1970’s. These books are a great introduction to magic and to a lot of Celtic lore and mythology. I wish she didn’t so absolutely identify light with good and dark with evil, and occasionaly her use of ancient lore and texts twists them away from their true meanings. However, they are great reading! The titles, in order, are: Over Sea, Under Stone; The Dark is Rising; Greenwitch; The Grey King; Silver on the Tree.
I recently ran across a Fundamentalist book of propaganda warning of the imminent Pagan takeover of the minds and hearts of America’s children, in which excerpts from The Dark is Rising were compared line by line with excerpts from The Spiral Dance, evidently to show that what seemed like innocent fantasy was really part of the great Witchcraft conspiracy. Considering that Cooper’s book was published in 1973, and The Spiral Dance not until ’79, I couldn’t quite understand how this influence was supposed to have occurred unless we were truly experts at time manipulation, but it made me take a close look at the series and yes, she does include in it a lot of intuitive knowledge about how magic works. (Alas, if there were a Great Pagan conspiracy, we’d probably have to hire a few Fundamentalists to effectively organize it for us!)
Edward Eager—This is one author I can recommend without reservation. American, his books are set mostly in the Fifties/early Sixties—but two, Magic and Magic by the Lake, are set earlier, in the Twenties. Time travel is often a theme. He takes ordinary children and brings in unruly magic which often has to be thwarted in order to work. Intelligent, charming, and funny, he teaches a lot about spellworking.
C.S. Lewis—His Narnia series is a classic, and as a child I read and reread the books. After about my tenth reading of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, I suddenly realized it was a Christian allegory. This didn’t disturb me, and given that the Christianity is cloaked in magical worlds, talking animals, myths come to life, I wouldn’t worry too much about that aspect. However, what disturbs me more, today, is that the evil force in Narnia is identified with the Witch, and the good magic all comes from men. Lewis is very much an Englishman of his time and class, and his books are very moralistic—not necessarily always a bad thing. Also, for those of you raising your boys to be in touch with feelings and unashamed of emotion, the books are clear that crying is babyish and barely acceptable for girls, let alone boys. This could make for good discussions about differing cultures and values; it might even be a useful counterbalance for some of the Pagan children I know to be exposed to the idea that discipline and restraint can have value.
Eleanor Farjeon—Her book The Little White Horse is a wonderful magical allegory about the transformation of evil. Sweet, funny and delightful, its only flaw is the almost inevitable association of dark with bad and white with good. Available in paperback.
Edith Nesbitt (Bland)—a classic writer from the turn of the century, her books are so magical and so well-written that I would love to wholeheartedly recommend them. However, she too is very much a writer of her time and class. As a young child reading them, it never occurred to me that my people would have been among the below-stairs housemaids or worse, the greasy moneylenders that appear in her stories. I simply identified with the upper-middle-class children (albeit usually on the verge of impoverishment) about whom she writes. I could even ignore her slighting references to Jews as something quaint and out-of-date. Today, however, I cannot ignore her casual use of racial epithets and unreservedly recommend these books without suggesting some discussion and preparation. The House of Arden, however, is epithet-free and contains a portrait of a village Witch who is a healer and wise woman. If you can find a copy, buy it!
J.R.R. Tolkien—Yes, like the rest of the baby boomers, I spent a lot of my late adolescence submerged in TheLord of the Rings. Great stories, voluminous knowledge of Celtic and Saxon lore and languages, a wonderful vision of the Otherworld of the elves, and a created world so complex and real we want to believe in it. I’m always grateful I read his books before I became a feminist and noted the dearth of women characters. Ah well!
Aside from Eager, all these authors are English. My brother and I have commented that our early reading seems to have strongly influenced our development. Raised in a warm, loud, sometimes hysterical Jewish household where yelling was the normal mode of communication and complaining a strong, cultural trait, we somehow aquired a veneer of the values of the playing fields of Eton. Whether this did us good or harm, I really can’t say, and whether these books will still speak to Pagan children in the Nineties remains to be seen, but they are still all works I enjoy rereading. Let us hope that as our tradition grows, books will be written that reflect our values more completely but are still as engaging as these classics.