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Alison Uttley (17 December 1884 – 7 May 1976), née Alice Jane Taylor, was a prolific British writer of over 100 books. She is now best known for her children's series about Little Grey Rabbit, and Sam Pig.

Born in Cromford and brought up in rural Derbyshire, she was educated at the Lea School in Holloway and the Lady Manners School in Bakewell, where she developed a love for science which led to a scholarship to Manchester University to read physics. In 1906 she became the second woman honours graduate of the University.

After leaving university she trained as a teacher in Cambridge and in 1908 took up the post of physics teacher at the Fulham Secondary School for Girls. Three years later she married James Arthur Uttley. The Uttleys had one son, John Taylor. James Uttley committed suicide by drowning in 1930, his health having been affected by his service in the First World War. John also killed himself, deliberately driving his car off a cliff in 1978.

The Uttleys lived at Downs House, 13 Higher Downs, Bowdon, Cheshire from 1924 to 1938 which now has a blue plaque to signify the association.

Alice began writing to support herself and her son financially after she was widowed. Her first books were a series of tales about animals, including Little Grey Rabbit, The Little Red Fox, Sam Pig and Hare. She later wrote for older children and adults, particularly focussing on rural topics, notably in The Country Child (1931), a fictionalized account of her childhood experiences at her family farm home, Castletop, near Cromford. The close, vivid empathetic powers of nature observation exhibited in that book are combined with her interest in dreams and fantasy in one of her most popular works, A Traveller in Time (1939). Based on the Babington Plot of Anthony Babington at Dethick, near her family home, this romance mixes dream and historical fact in a story about a twentieth-century girl who is transported to the 16th century, becoming involved in a plot to free Mary, Queen of Scots from nearby Wingfield Manor. Uttley later settled in Beaconsfield, in a house named Thackers after the house in A Traveller in Time.

She had little time for one of her competitors, Enid Blyton, describing her as a boastful and a "vulgar, curled woman".

Uttley was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Letters degree by Manchester University in 1970 in recognition of her literary work.

In 2009 her private diaries, covering the period 1932 to 1971, were published for the first time - edited by Professor Denis Judd who had previously written Uttley's biography.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Alison Uttley", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0