Ursula Moray Williams | Biography

Author of seventy novels, Ursula Moray Williams has given children readable, absorbing tales, both fanciful and realistic, for more than half a century. Her books have been widely translated: Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse (1938), for instance, exists even in Japanese and Romansh. The majority of Williams's stories employ fantasy rooted in everyday reality, but she writes in so many modes, and to such varied age levels, that her work occupies no fixed niche in the history of children's literature. Imaginative narratives untrammeled by consistent logic and sets of lively characters untroubled by psychological complexity give her work broad appeal.

Ursula Moray Williams was born 19 April 1911 in Petersfield, Hampshire, to classics tutor A. Moray Williams and teacher Mabel Unwin. The Williamses rejoiced at the birth of twin daughters--Ursula and her sister Barbara--on what would have been the second birthday of an earlier child lost in infancy. The Williams children were educated at home in Petersfield by their Froebel-trained mother. Reared in rural isolation, the twins read widely and entertained one another with their own stories, tales they later wrote down and illustrated as gifts.

In a 1988 essay Williams describes her childhood as a happy one in spite of World War I. After the war the family moved to Eastleigh, now part of Southampton, where their father tutored classics in a nearby school. The eccentricities of the large Victorian palazzo ("The Folly") in which the family lived inspired Grandpapa's Folly and the Woodworm-Bookworm (1974) and provided the setting for A Castle for John Peter (1941). The twins succumbed to what Williams describes as "horse madness," a passion for ponies that she celebrates in several books, including The Twins and Their Ponies (1936) and No Ponies for Miss Pobjoy (1975).

The girls continued their home education with a governess until at seventeen they went to a girls' school on Lake Annecy in the French Alps. Though Williams claims they "loathed" studies at the lycée, she fixed the alpine setting in memory, and it later provided the background for several of her novels, notably The Three Toymakers (1946), Malkin's Mountain (1948), The Toymaker's Daughter (1968), and Boy in a Barn (1970).

After their year in France, the sisters returned to the Winchester College of Art, where, after some months of study, the two began to move in different career directions. Barbara continued in art; Ursula committed herself to writing children's stories. "My parents very generously allowed me to stay at home and write," she says. Her uncle, publisher Sir Stanley Unwin, helped her place early books and find a good agent.

In 1935 Williams married Peter John, great-grandson to Robert Southey, former Poet-Laureate of England (1813-1843). Barbara moved to Iceland with her husband, an Icelandic sculptor, and continued her career as wood engraver and artist. She illustrated a few of Ursula's books until geographical distance made continued collaboration difficult. Ursula Williams and her husband, Peter, moved to Hampstead, where she combined writing children's books with homemaking.

Her thirty-nine-year marriage produced four sons, most of them born during World War II. During 1940 she lived in Claygate, southwest of London, but when Peter's war work took him to Beckford, Gloucestershire, the family went too. There they shared a Beckford house with a mother and two little girls seeking safety from London bombings. Shared nannies took charge of the children every afternoon, and this, Williams reported, allowed her writing to prosper. These years produced some of her most popular books, such as Gobbolino, the Witch's Cat (1942) and The Good Little Christmas Tree (1943).

Ursula Moray Williams's first major success, Adventures of the Little Wooden Horse, typifies her most satisfying work. An unassuming protagonist tumbles unintentionally into wild, picaresque adventures in which events occur rapidly and often without clear causal links. The protagonist survives by a combination of luck and wit. The Little Wooden Horse's adventures subject him to harsh employers, unexpected sea voyages, and work in a coal mine, as a circus horse, and as a seaside children's donkey. Steadfast loyalty, courage, and unselfishness sustain the reluctant hero, who craves security and affection more than adventure.

The four novels constituting the Toymaker Tetralogy--unified by Marta, the morally ambiguous mechanical doll--represent Williams's most complex and thematically interesting work. Not published in narrative sequence, these books stirred Williams's imagination for years--beginning with Anders and Marta (1935). Ageless and beautiful, Marta vacillates between being a passive toy and a morally awakened human child. In The Three Toymakers Rudi, an alpine wood-carver, competes for a prize with other toymakers including Marta's creator, the evil Malkin, who has taught her seductive, mischievous, and controlling ways. Rudi's young brother, Anders, befriends Marta and awakens human compassion and generosity in her. Anders, a well-intentioned but flawed human, nearly brings about disaster through his own naughtiness, curiosity, and misplaced enthusiasm. Though Malkin loses the toy competition because of Marta's bad behavior, he remains unregenerate, exiled with Marta to the other side of the mountain.

Malkin's Mountain finds Rudi married and the father of twin sons. The twins and their Uncle Anders rescue Rudi, held captive by Malkin inside the mountain, while Malkin's army of wooden soldiers threatens to destroy the good people of Rudi's village. Marta, now Malkin's doll-queen, taunts Rudi, captures his twins, and tries to seduce good characters with offers of power. Anders's faith and diligence provide Rudi with materials for the golden key needed to break Malkin's power. Rudi's inventiveness and persistence prevail, and Malkin is foiled. Marta, selfish and perverse as ever, inadvertently frustrates Malkin's evil plan and thus allows good to triumph.

The redoubtable Marta reappears a generation later in The Toymaker's Daughter. Dropped by an eagle at the feet of Anders's daughter Niclo, Marta is just a vulnerable wind-up doll. Claiming she wants to learn to be a real person by living with Anders's family, she confesses the secret of her key to Niclo and promises to learn humility and generosity. But her efforts to eliminate the half-mad, self-destructive behavior she has learned from Malkin fail. Malkin tempts her with power as queen of his household, where she can have things just as she likes. In the end she chooses Malkin and the other side of the mountain. To Williams's credit, the tetralogy engages problems of absolute evil through an unself-conscious, absorbing narrative--one that retains shades of moral complexity without damaging the pace of the plot.

The opening sentence of The Nine Lives of Island Mackenzie (1959) demonstrates Williams's mastery of audience-baiting storytelling: "One August afternoon a little shipwrecked cat called Mackenzie was swimming for his life toward a desert island, pursued by eight hungry sharks." Mad adventures befall Mackenzie and Miss Pettifer, a maiden lady who rivals Mackenzie in the affections of Captain Foster. The plot has the spontaneous air of an ad-libbed bedtime story: shipwrecks, fires, cannibals, and storms precede a happy if improbable ending. Edward Ardizzone's illustrations share Williams's daring mixture of madcap phantasm with the banal quotidian.

Williams, widowed since 1974, lives at Court Farm in Gloucestershire. She served as magistrate on the Evesham bench into her seventies, and she says that she has "probably stopped writing books at the moment" in favor of tending to her acre of garden and her family. "What fun it was!" she says of her story-making capacity, a gift for which she is grateful. Of her creative resources she once said, "When winter comes I dive into my imaginary bag and pull out the outline of a plot.... So I begin...." Sometimes inconsistent, even incoherent, her plots never fail to engage. Her prose is graceful, lively, surefooted. Her simple, forthright values and amusingly unrepentant protagonists please children far removed from the sunshine world she once shared with her twin sister, Barbara.