Daisy Ashford
Personal Information
Description
> Daisy (Margaret Mary Julia) Ashford was born in Petersham, Surrey in 1881, the eldest of the three daughters of William Ashford and the sixth child of his wife Emma. She dictated her first story, 'The Life of Father McSwiney', when she was four and finished her last, 'The Hangman's Daughter', when she was fourteen. The Young Visiters, her most famous story, was written in 1890 soon after the family moved to Lewes, Sussex. Daisy was 36 when The Young Visiters was rediscovered and it was published two years later in 1919. In the following January she married James Devlin and spent the rest of her life in Norfolk. They had four children. Although all five of her other stories that survived from her childhood were published, she never took up writing again. She died in January 1972.
Books
The young visiters [sic], or, Mr. Salteena's plan
> The Young Visiters has long been established as comic masterpiece; many of its entrancing phrases have passed into common usage. It has been dramatised for the stage and television and made into a musical. This classic story of life and love in late Victorian England as seen from the nursery window has been in print ever since it was first published in 1919, nearly thirty years after it was written by the nine year-old Daisy. >Now an entirely new edition of The Young Visiters has been produced. It has been illustrated with drawings by Posy Simmonds which are as enchanting and witty as the story. The text has been transcribed afresh from the original and J. M. Barrie's famous preface, written with all the authority of the author of Peter Pan, has been retained.
The hangman's daughter
Germany, 1659: When a dying boy is pulled from the river with a mark crudely tattooed on his shoulder, hangman Jakob Kuisl is called upon to investigate whether witchcraft is at play in his small Bavarian town. Whispers and dark memories of witch trials and the women burned at stake just seventy years earlier still haunt the streets of Schongau. When more children disappear and an orphan boy is found dead, marked by the same tattoo, the mounting hysteria threatens to erupt into chaos. Before the unrest forces him to torture and execute the very woman who aided in the birth of his children, Jakob must unravel the truth. With the help of his clever daughter, Magdelena, and Simon, the university-educated son of the town's physician, Jakob discovers that a devil is indeed loose in Schongau. But it may be too late to prevent bloodshed.
Where Love Lies Deepest
>Where Love Lies Deepest is the heady, romantic tale of Beatrice Langton ("she was a lovely girl!!") and Laurence Cathcart the man who loves her ("how exquisitely curly his hair and mustache"). Their love has no easy course to run, and many years pass between her first rejection of his suit in Devonshire and their agonised reunion at a military hospital in Calcutta. >Daisy Ashford was twelve when she wrote Where Love Lies Deepest - three years older than when she had finished her famous The Young Visiters. The gap between writer and subject has narrowed; in The Young Visiters a child was writing about the strange world of adults, here she is a young girl depicting a rather older one. But, true to form, she retains a sharply satirical eye, and her style is as felicitous as ever (literary critics will doubtless note her bold and imaginative use of the historic present).