Anybody familiar with the work of the British children's writer Helen Creswell?

I found this appreciation of her mid-seventies novel The Winter of the Birds and tracked it down. It's very, very good.

Then I found this obit after she died in 2005.

Also, did we all know there's a children's literature museum in Newcastle On Tyne?

Oh yes, she's well known here. I loved 'Moondial' as a child - I think it was adapted for children's TV.

I loved her Bagthorpe books. I think the first in the series is Absolute Zero (which is the name of the family dog). I think Emmett might like them, actually. The are sort of intellectual-wacky and not action-wacky, but good and wacky.

Oh yes, she's well known here. I loved 'Moondial' as a child - I think it was adapted for children's TV.

She wrote a great deal for television, particularly in the eighties.

Would that American fantasy writers had such patronage.

Any good recs for a collection of traditional fairy tales, and/or King Arthur stories? For a 4yo listener?

We've got lots of "actual" King Arthur (Malory, etc), and original Grimm, but no simple short versions of the basics.

T.H. White, Raq?

Quartet of novels by T.H. White, published in a single volume in 1958. The quartet comprises The Sword in the Stone (1938), The Queen of Air and Darkness--first published as The Witch in the Wood (1939)--The Ill-Made Knight (1940), and The Candle in the Wind (published in the composite volume, 1958). The series is a retelling of the Arthurian legend, from Arthur's birth to the end of his reign, and is based largely on Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte Darthur. After White's death, a conclusion to The Once and Future King was found among his papers; it was published in 1977 as The Book of Merlyn.

Or the Tennyson, for reading aloud.

ETA: Neither of which are particularly short, sorry.

My favorite book of fairy tales when I was growing up is now out of print, but still findable--Fifty Famous Fairy Stories, by Bruno Frost. My favorite interpretation of some standard fairy tales is Robin McKinley's A Door in the Hedge. She has a knack for the retelling, giving the characters life and the situations some plausibility, and her language is lovely. Not immediately accessible to a four-year-old, but lovely to read aloud, and to have read to you.

She wrote a great deal for television, particularly in the eighties.

Yep, scripts for such children's television gems as 'Five Children and It', and her own writing was adapted for TV too (as was the case with 'Moondial', which was her own novel). Some really great fantasy there.

Thanks, Bev - we've got the T.H. White, so I'll give that a shot and see how it goes. I have a few of the Tennyson poems in other collections, but I think I'll get that book to add to the Camelot shelf anyway.

I am highly amused that "customers who purchased Idylls of the King also purchased Shane".

There's a biography about Hope Mirrlees coming out.

Lovely picture - you can see why Virginia Woolf described her as: “her own heroine — capricious, exacting, exquisite, very learned, and beautifully dressed.”

Thanks to you people, I bought the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo last night. I'd actually given it as a gift, but never read it myself!