It’s really important to remember that Diana Wynne Jones was dyslexic and that when she was a little girl and said she wanted to be a writer, people told her that she couldn’t be a writer because of her dyslexia. She became an incredibly popular author.
She actually became the greatest writer in the English language of the 20th century. It’ll take a couple of hundred years for academia to recognize this because she was female, she was funny, and she wrote for children, but – seriously. Try it. Read the best Jones alongside the best Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Nobokov, anybody whose life overlapped hers who is canonized in literature courses, she will win handily on any criterion you care to use; style, theme, structure, characterization, sheer reading pleasure. Hell, the worst Jones will stand up against the best of some of them! (I leave you to name your own names, but I bet someone’s already occurred to you.)
I love her books so much. Every single one I’ve read is so vibrant and colorful and whimsical and memorable. She created such beautiful worlds that children and adults alike could find an escape in. She was brilliant.
She really was. I attended a talk/lecture of hers entirely on accident and it was one of the best days of my life.
When I was in second grade we had to practice writing letters by writing to our favorite authors. Everyone else wrote to RL Stein or the like, while I wrote to DWJ. Everyone else got a form letter. I got a typewriter’ed note from her responding to my letter and adding her own thoughts.
Honestly I have this suspicion that DWJ doesn’t get recognized for how brilliant her writing is cause it’s TOO brilliant. Like, she’s just too good at making it too easy. And her work can be read at a deep or shallow level and all sorts between, so you can read Howl’s as a generic fantasy without realizing it’s an absolute send-up, or a social commentary, or a feminist manifesto, or a fucking razor sharp psychological character study. And you’d be having a marvelous good time reading it.
Good Literature got this Rule that it needs to be unpleasureable to be Good, that it must be Difficult or Uncomfortable or Ugly. I could go off on why but I’ll leave it at gatekeeping. Make Good Literature so nasty and not fun that finishing a book becomes some sort of litmus test of Who’s In. If Good Literature was something just anybody could get through how would we know who was important? /ugh
The thing about DWJ is that you can read her in any way: as genre or even as mainstream literature, as a children’s book or an adult’s book. And she doesn’t rely on tropes to make her point. So many of her characters seem real. Especially the teenagers.
I suspect DWJ would have very much agreed with this accurate assessment of “Good Litearture.”
I agree with all this, but also, I wanted to add that I got a letter back from her too when I wrote a fan letter; she wrote back and apologised for taking so long because she’d been laid up with an illness like in Hexwood, and said that all her books had a way of coming true for her eventually but it was very inconvenient that this one had.
I recently picked up Howl’s Moving Castle on reread and I realized something I never had before, which certainly isn’t in the Ghibli movie, so I hate to spoil people who haven’t read it, but I just have to mention it. As a young American child I simply accepted the bit where they RANDOMLY visit Howl’s home. But as an adult I just started laughing my ass off because I SUDDENLY GOT IT. what a fucking hilarious swerve in a High Fantasyland story.
Basically, Howl is an adventure-comedy set in a sort of medieval-ish High Fantasyland, like a generic Disney story. At one point the characters make a brief visit to Howl’s home. Howl is…. NOT from High Fictional Fantasyland. He is FAR more exotic than that.
He is… in fact… Welsh. And worse: modern. He is, in fact, a grad student. He is a flippant Welsh fuckup with a PhD, who keeps his car at his sister’s house because he’s incapable of adulting properly. Reading between the lines, he may be maintaining an ENTIRE life in the magical medieval land of Ingary simply in order to escape the bother of finding a job in academia. Fuckin relatable, am I right?
I have read all the DWJ Books multiple times and can’t believe why it’s so hard to find copies of her books in shops, it’s soo much better and so much more fun to read than most of the awful fiction available nowadays.
Holy shit, I gotta read Howl’s Moving Castle again.
Dark Lord of Derkholm was one of my absolute favorites as a preteen.
Loki is the Philosopher King 