Girls take the lead...
The recent nine-day Oxford Literary Festival was jam-packed with events. With eight reviews, n2 could barely scrape the surface, but here’s a taste of what we saw. The 2025 festival takes place between Saturday, March 29, and Sunday, April 6, keep your di
Jacqueline Wilson and Tom Holland at the Oxford Literary Festival on Sunday, March 24
Review by JON LEWIS
Holland loves the myths where Athenian girls turn into bears as their rite of passage. He suggests Gorgo and her Spartan females become werewolves instead
IN talks in the Sheldonian
Theatre, Dame Jacqueline Wilson and historian Tom Holland entertained large family audiences about their latest books, Wilson’s The Girl who Wasn’t There, illustrated by Rachel Dean, and Holland’s The Wolf Girl, The Greeks and the Gods illustrated by Jason Cockcroft.
Wilson was inspired to write her novel by gazing at a folly near where she lives. The Starkey family moves into caravan alongside a folly with the aim of doing it up as their house. Mr Starkey, jobless, buys his two girls, Luna and Aurora, a dog Molly, who is based on Wilson’s own dog, to make them happy about the move to the countryside. Luna, the eldest, settles in well while the youngest befriends a child called Tansy who no one has ever seen. Is Tansy a ghost? Has Aurora been possessed? Luna becomes a detective to find out.
Wilson, whose family was not wealthy, gained her first writing job was as a junior journalist in Dundee, working at a magazine publisher. The popular girls’ magazine Jackie was named after her because she was the youngest member of the staff.
She began to write as a child when sick, “I made up my own stories, gave them different pictures”.
She read The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton where “I fell in love with Silky the Fairy, longed to do magic. I loved the long dresses. The books were magic to me”.
Holland became fascinated with Greek mythology through the stories of Roger Lancelyn Green as a child, but there was “a sense of disappointment. When Odysseus gets back home, that’s it, no more heroes and monsters”.
He wants to bring the world of the gods and warriors to children by making his central character the young princess of Sparta, Gorgo. Later she becomes the wife of Leonidas who led the Spartan army against the Persians at the battle of Thermopylae.
Holland loves the myths where Athenian girls turn into bears as their rite of passage. He suggests Gorgo and her Spartan females become werewolves instead, as their pact with the gods.
Inspiring.