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...