She had spent a long apprenticeship as a storyteller to nieces and nephews
Violet Needham: born in 1876, in London, she was 63 by the time the Black Riders was published, whereafter she turned out children’s novels annually
I guessed the book might be Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle , which doesn’t have an Anastasia, or Esmerelda, or chocolate, but does involve arsenic-infused blackberries and a weird uncle who keeps the children secluded.
Alas, I can’t find the text of The House of the Paladin anywhere online and the National Library doesn’t have a copy. But I gather from reviews that the novel’s wealthy heroine is recently orphaned and at the mercy of an evil uncle, her guardian and heir. She had spent a long apprenticeship as an oral storyteller to nieces and nephews, however, which is where much of her material originated.
Speaking of faces, Needham’s mother – the daughter of a wealthy Dutch aristocrat – is said to have been very beautiful. Unfortunately, suggests the Violet Needham Society, the author instead inherited her appearance from a grandfather who was MP for Armagh in the 1820s and who once described his own features as “injudiciously heaped together”.
One of the stories about him is that in later years he rehearsed his entry into the afterlife by dressing in a shroud, lying in his coffin, and having servants push him from house to mausoleum via a low tunnel under what is now Kilmorey Road, near Twickenham.
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