Dorothy Edwards

Background

She was born on 6 November 1914 as Dorothy Violet Ellen Brown into a working-class family in Teddington, Richmond Upon Thames. Her mother's maiden name was Saunders.

Her father taught her to read at an early age, enabling her to write her first story at four years of age. Her stories, poems and articles were published throughout her twenties, and at this time she married her husband Francis P. "Frank" Edwards in 1942, and had two children, Jane and Frank. She died in 1982 and was buried alongside her younger sister Phyllis Mary F. Brown known as "Pip" (1920-1977), to whom her Naughty Little Sister books were dedicated.

Publications

Edwards' most famous stories are of My Naughty Little Sister, which she conceived to keep her daughter, Jane, quiet whilst on a family holiday in 1950. She wrote five books of these stories.

She also published several anthologies of short stories, folklore and poetry for children, chiefly on the subjects of magic, witchcraft and ghosts. Two of these are Ghosts and Shadows 1980 and Mists and Magic 1983.

Radio

Edwards helped to devise the radio show Listen with Mother on which her Naughty Little Sister books were broadcast from 1950, and she also wrote for Playschool and Jackanory.

Awards

She was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award for children's literature for The Witches and the Grinnygog 1981, a novel for children about the survival of benign pagan witchcraft in modern Britain. This novel was later adapted for television.