Eva Ibbotson: Writer of Theme, Characterization, and Imagery
British author Eva Ibbotson was one of the most imaginative writers to come about. Michael Morpurgo states, “Eva Ibbotson weaves a magic like no other. Once enchanted, always enchanted” (“Eva Ibbotson Dies Aged 85”). She may not have been well-known, but she was still admired among the people who were familiar with her works, and she was able to sell many novels. Ibbotson was born in 1925 in Vienna, Austria. She later moved to London, England, where she lived the remainder of her life. Her life ended on October 20, 2010. She was a full-time writer, but she had been a former schoolteacher and university teacher before (“Eva Ibbotson (1925-) Biography…”). Most of her books are meant for children and young adults. This could be because she had worked with kids for a large part of her years as a teacher. In addition, Ibbotson had spent her childhood transferring back and forth to her separated parents’ houses. Michelle Pauli states, “Ibbotson described this period of her childhood as "cosmopolitan but unhappy" and she attributed to it her desire for happy endings in which her characters always find a home.” Eva Ibbotson was “A self-confessed "happy endings freak", she expressed some bemusement at trends for darker children's fiction and her books always reassured young readers that good would be rewarded and that spoilt brats and greedy grown-ups would get their comeuppance (Pauli). She was also one to use different methods to seize her young audience’s attention. In her works, she used theme, characterization, and imagery to convey to her readers special literary aspects of the story.
In Eva Ibbotson’s book, The Great Ghost Rescue, she used the theme to demons...
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Charlotte Brontë uses literary technique in her novel “Shirley” to characterize the phases of leaving childhood and entering adulthood. “Elf-land lies behind us, the shores of reality rises in front,” is a quote from”Shirley” that is a literary device used to show how the age of 18 is where Caroline Helstone is leaving childhood (“Elf-land”) and is about her new age. Brontë uses metaphors, personification, and imagery to foreshadow what it will be like to enter adulthood once becoming eighteen.
She has enjoyed greater commercial success, longevity and popularity despite her reputation for writing unacceptable and bad literature. Blyton also fulfils the dictionary definition of prestigious as she has had influence, a reputation (which has shifted from good to bad) derived from passed achievements. She produced an enormous amount of writing in her career; at its height, in 1955, she produced no less than 70 works in a single year. She was a respected educationalist writing educational primers and with a weekly column in Teachers World (1923-27). It is hardly surprising that vast numbers of people have read her novels.
Structure – The work is formatted to be a play. It has three acts, each beginning with stage directions.
From infancy, children depend on their parents to do for them what they cannot do for themselves. They learn to recognize the faces of loved ones from an early age, and with no one else to rely on, they trust those loved ones to keep them safe and sound. But what about the children who aren’t fortunate enough to have another human being to depend on, the children who are left to raise themselves? Furthermore, is raising oneself from an early age a possibility or do such ideas only exist in fantasy? In “Abandoned Children” Rachel Fuchs suggest that “Any child who lives beyond birth does so only through his or her dependency on another human being” (Fuchs, 6) While this has proved true, especially during the nineteenth century when the survival rate of children was only a small percentage of what it is today, it is orphans, children who are forced to stand on their own two feet in order to beat the odds constructed by society, that make for exciting adventure heroes. Although authors may choose to base their stories on orphans for a variety of reasons, this essay will attempt to understand the motives behind choosing an orphaned protagonist. Characters like Mary Lennox in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s story, “The Secret Garden” and Anne Shirley in L.M. Montgomery’s story “Anne of Green Gables” are identifiable characters and it is because of the popularity of these characters that orphans came to be a commonly used protagonist in the literary world. It is difficult to understand why such sorrowful characters would be ideal literary heroes. “Unlike orphan stories, most describe a childhood more sweet and innocent than most, if not all, children ever experience.” (Nodelman, 220) Do readers find ‘Orphan stories’ enticing simply because the...
Susan Eloise Hinton was born on July 1948 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. As a child Susan was very passionate about reading and according to notablebiographies.com she has a said that she read “because their was nothing else to do growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma.” She was very introverted as a child. As she grew older her love for literature grew and grew,when she was a Junior in high school her father was diagnosed with cancer. She often wrote to get away from thinking about it. Soon after, she had a friend tell her about when he was beaten up by some “nice” kids while walking home from school. They had nice cars and wore nice clothes were just beating him up because he was a greaser. Susan was very upset about this happening and just started writing
It is time that we start to look at the changes women have made in the comparison to the events surrounding them. We do not expect the women of today to behave and act submissively as though they were the women of the Medieval Era. Rather than looking at the news or textbooks for the evolution answer, the women of century were depicted in works of literature. The opposition against using media comes from an article from The Journal of Social Psychology Department written by Leslie McArthur and Beth Resko about the selection of men and women for commercials where men were selected more often but women had a better connection with the audience. These sex differences proved highly unfavorable for
A Doll’s House by Henrik Ibsen, is a play about a woman who realizes that she is worth more than she has been given credit. Her whole life she was treated like a little doll; too fragile to do anything serious, too frail to be troubled with real business. She was the wife, mother and homemaker. The only things she was perceived as capable of were running the home, raising the children and looking pretty. This was a common stereotype for women in the 1880’s. Women were treated as possessions, not people.
Ibsen created an environment for women to question the society they lived in. Nora and Hedda, two feminists living in a masculine household bereft of happiness, desired to evade their unhappy life at home under the guidance of a man. Eventually, both women escaped from their husband’s grasp, but Hedda resorted to suicide in order to leave. Nora agreed with Lois Wyse by showing her strengths with pride to everybody, while Hedda hid her strengths like a coward by killing herself. Ibsen used numerous literary elements and techniques to enhance his writing and to help characterize the two protagonists.
Mary Anne Evans, otherwise known as George Elliot, was a prominent Victorian novelist. As a woman, she wrote under a pseudonym to avoid prejudice against her work by society’s male biased gender stance. A political player, many of her works highlighted current political issues, and unlike many of her fellow authors, she focused on the lower working class, instead of the upper aristocracy, and let her characters identify Agnostically, which was very abnormal for her time. Mary Anne Evans was a self-made success, who highlighted social issues, ad thrived against adversity in a male dominated world.
One day, there was this girl called Anayra Ivette but right after years pass they called her lightning girl she had special powers she also had purple hair and blue eyes. She's 5’7 tall when shes 15 years old and she's 5 years old in the beginning of the story. She lived in a small place where the woods are in Methuen she lives with her mom, dad, sister and brother in the country of massachusetts. When she was getting older as an adult she didn't like people she turned real bad. This is a tall tale about a girl using her powers.
Margaret Lucas Cavendish was born into a wealthy family located near Colchester, England. Margaret was the youngest child of eight children and was loved just as dearly as the rest. She like most her siblings took on education with a governess and learned what they needed to get by in the world. Unlike her other siblings Margaret showed signs of admiration towards reading and writing, but more towards her writings. While in her youth she managed to write sixteen of what she called her “Baby Books”, the shortest of which consisted of 50-75 pages of written work. It was at this point that she found her passion for the written word.
Agatha Christie was a remarkable author that had her own style and “flair” of writing. Born in England, she grew up with inspirations to write. However, like many authors, the events in her life affected her writings including experiences which made her want to write. Although Agatha Christie had many events that affected her life, in the end she remained true to who she was.
Miss Havisham adopted a young, stunning girl named Estella. Daily, Miss Havisham forced the girl to steal the heart of young men and lovingly torture them. However Estella had no choice, Miss Havisham did not care if she wanted to go outside and run away. Estella’s nefarious mother eliminated any of her opinions or freedoms of being an innocent young girl. In chapter 33, Es...
I thought it would never end. Some other comments are that she called the book plainness to its prose and they lack the descriptive style to make the scene come alive. She also thinks that kids our age are not interested in the “The Diary Of A Young Girl”. In my opinion, she is wrong, we need to learn what happen to her and what it was like when she was in the concentration
Enid Mary Blyton whom was born on 11 August 1897 in East Dulwich, South London, was one of the distinguished authors of children’s storybooks. She has sold over 600 million copies of her works which made her books one of the bestsellers. Besides that, her books have also been translated into over 90 different languages. Although she had a good relationship with her parents, but soon after, her parents were separated, and she and her siblings had to put on an act whenever people asked where their father went. Due to this, it affected her negatively, both emotionally and physically. As a result, she wrote about her traumatic experience in a book called The Six Bad Boys. Futhermore, after she got married, she found out that she could not conceive a child owing to her uterus not fully developed, which could have been one of the effects of her father leaving. Blyton attended a small school called Tresco, later she became a student at St. Cristopher’s School, and finally went to a music school which was the Guildhall School of Music. Blyton wrote a lot of story books and poems in between but her most remembered works were Noddy, The Famous Five and The Secret Seven series which were all published in the 1920s-30s. Moreover, other famous works of her were Adventures of the Wishing Chair and also The Enchanted Wood. Nevertheless, she ran into a controversy as her writings were not consistent and the speed of her works that she produced made others assumed that she had an army of ‘ghost writers’, which she strongly denied. Since she wrote on a variety of genres, including mystery stories, fantasy, biblical narratives and more, libraries and schools started to ban her works in the 1950s and onwards. Additional...