Green Knowe

The Manor, Hemingford Grey, the 12th-century house on which Green Knowe was based

Green Knowe is a series of six children's novels written by Lucy M. Boston, illustrated by her son Peter Boston,[1] and published from 1954 to 1976.[2][3] It features a very old house, Green Knowe, based on Boston's home at the time, The Manor in Hemingford Grey, Huntingdonshire, England.[4] In the novels she brings to life the people she imagines might have lived there.[5]

For the fourth book in the series, A Stranger at Green Knowe (1961), Boston won the annual Carnegie Medal, recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject.[6] She was a commended runner up for both the first and second books.[7][a]

Some of the stories feature Toseland, a boy called Tolly for short, and his great-grandmother Mrs. Oldknow. Green Knowe is inhabited by the spirits of people who lived there in ages past, and more than one of the spirits Tolly knows as children later grow into adults. Other supernatural entities in the series include the children's dog, Orlando; a demonic tree-spirit, Green Noah (manifesting as a large tree on the grounds of the manor house); and an animated statue of St. Christopher.

The first five books were published in the UK by Faber and Faber, from 1954 to 1964, and in the US by Harcourt, the first in 1955, and the others within the calendar year of British publication. The last book appeared after more than a decade, published by The Bodley Head and Atheneum Books in 1976.[2][3]

Lucy M. Boston also published an excerpt from An Enemy At Green Knowe as a short story, "Demon at Green Knowe" (1964), which was compiled in Spooks, Spooks, Spooks (1966).[8]

WorldCat reports that the six Green Knowe novels are Boston's works most widely held by participating libraries, by a wide margin.[1]

  1. ^ a b "Boston, L. M. (Lucy Maria) 1892–1990". Worldcat. Retrieved 3 October 2012.
  2. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference isfdb-series was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference bookseller was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  4. ^ "History: The Manor, Hemingford Grey". Green Knowe.
  5. ^ "The Magic of the Manor, Hemingford Grey". YouTube.
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference medal1961 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference ccsu was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ "Spooks, Spooks, Spooks: Stories and Poems of the Supernatural". GoodReads. Archived from the original on 19 September 2015.


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