It comes as a surprise to most fans of the popular Just William series that the creator of the quintessentially scruffy, ebullient, anti-intellectual, and antiestablishment eleven-year-old William was a woman. Richmal Crompton was in many ways the very opposite of the character whose creation made her famous. A private, self-effacing woman, she taught classics before illness forced her into retirement at the age of thirty-three. She never married and had no children of her own. Richmal Crompton's unusual Christian name, an amalgam of some distant forebears' Christian names, Richard and Mally (the latter a nickname for Mary), creates an ambiguity that no doubt contributed to the early mystique surrounding her identity. Her name was in fact Richmal Crompton Lamburn--known to her friends as "Ray"--and the early anonymity that her nom de plume afforded her was reluctantly relinquished with her growing fame. Indeed, Crompton was always a little...