Want fewer ads?

Gillian (Elise) Avery is a British children’s novelist and literary historian.

She was born in Reigate on September 30, 1926 and attended Dunottar School there.. She worked first as a journalist, on the Surrey Mirror, then for Chambers Encyclopedia and Oxford University Press. In 1952 she married the literary scholar A.O.J. Cockshut, with whom she moved to Manchester, returning to Oxford in 1966.

She is the author of several studies of children’s history and early children’s literature; and this scholarly interest is reflected in her own books for children, which have a Victorian setting. The first, The Warden’s Niece (1957) is a witty adventure story, in which Maria runs away from her stultifying boarding school to live with her great-uncle, the head of an Oxford college. He decides to let her stay, impressed by her academic ambitions (she wants to become Professor of Greek); and she proves her abilities as a researcher by uncovering a piece of history from the civil war. Characters from the book reappear in The Elephant War (1960), which concerns the attempt to prevent the sale of London Zoo’s Jumbo to P.T. Barnum, and The Italian Spring (1962).

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