Beginning her publishing career with adult mysteries in the early 1950s, Bawden wrote her first children's book, The Secret Passage, in 1963. As she told Edward Blishen in a 1975 interview, writing "for children was a logical development for me. I wanted to write, not as a grown-up looking back, but as a former child, remembering the emotional landscape I had once moved in, how I had felt, what concerned me, what I wanted to know." Child characters in her adult work experience some of the same concerns and adventures, but the perspective is not the limited, focused view presented in the juvenile titles. "When I started to write it never occurred to me to write for children. I wrote about them, for adults, partly because the child's viewpoint is (as Henry James knew) a sly way of commenting on adult society, and partly because I remembered my own childhood so vividly, particularly the frustrations of being a child. Children think and feel deeply, in some ways more deeply than adults."
During the thirty years that Bawden has written children's books, this intensity of feeling has been a fulcrum of her work.
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