Ruth Arthur, in … An Old Magic, returns to one of her persistent themes, the genius of place. Places—mountains, pools, houses, rocks—are not passive recipients of experience; they absorb, store up and give out the experiences gained in and around them. (p. 239)

Miss Arthur is not in the strict sense a regional writer. She ranges wide for her settings between Italy and the Scottish Isles—and even, indirectly, Malaya—and she writes always from personal knowledge. She seems to return most fondly to West Wales …, East Anglia and Cumberland…. Only one has a completely foreign setting and that the least characteristic of all her work—My Daughter Nicola. Her treatment of settings is a model for aspiring writers in this field. Direct description is rare. She builds up a picture in the reader's mind by a host of small touches incorporated in the narrative. This, I fancy, is not just because of the remembered tedium of Sir Walter Scott or because she is consciously gearing her style to the needs and the capabilities of young readers, but because this is her own method, a very personal technique developed by trial and error. The rare set pieces of description, when they come, are the more impressive. Witness, for example, the magnificent vision of an undermountain hall of quartz in My Daughter Nicola and half a page distilling the essence of a Cumbrian winter in The Little Dark Thorn: "the stillness brought by the snow, the hooting of an owl in the darkness or the light bark of a fox took on a new sound, a quality of magic".

"Magic" is a recurring word, not as an easy refuge from reality but as the key to a deeper reality.

The first of Miss Arthur's stories of girls growing up contains many of the elements which have become part of her professional equipment. Dragon Summer … appeared in 1962. (pp. 239-40)

[Contained in Dragon Summer], in embryo or fully developed, are many of the Arthur characteristics. The heroine, as always, is the narrator. A leading character—not in this case the heroine—has difficult family circumstances. There is a benevolent retainer. The house and its surroundings play an active part in the action. The house is haunted, not by a spirit from the remote past but by an owner only recently dead.

These are features which recur again and again. Miss Arthur could be accused, by those who look only on the surface, of making plots by formula. Willow in Requiem for a Princess, who is troubled by the discovery that she is adopted, is not unlike Kirsty in The Whistling Boy, who cannot get on with her stepmother. Both girls solve their problems by going to stay with strangers and becoming involved in mysteries from the past. Willow [in Requiem for a Princess] and Betony in On the Wasteland both discover the past in dreams. The special communion of spirit between twins is a theme in Portrait of Margarita, The Whistling Boy and An Old Magic. Perdita in The Saracen Lamp, like Willow, becomes obsessed with someone from the past, almost to the exclusion of the present.

It is not the similarity of material that matters but the variety of treatment. The formula writer uses the same sequence of events, the same set of types, merely changing the names and the superficial features from story to story. Each of Miss Arthur's novels is an individual work, presenting and solving its own problems.

A more serious criticism might be made on stylistic grounds. At one stage in her writing, not, curiously enough, the first, Miss Arthur seemed prodigal to the point of self-indulgence in the use of adjectives and adverbs. Every noun, however unimportant, became associated, qualified and adorned by its accompanying epithet, so that the prose became—what it must never be—predictable. Well, Homer had the same weakness and so had most of the world's great writers. Miss Arthur has purged herself of the habit now. It is strongly in evidence in some of the middle novels, and one accepts it, readily enough, as part of the small price to pay for the enjoyment of some superb story-telling and much acute observation.

The books do not fall easily into the categories devised by tidy-minded adults for the classification of children's fiction. Although more often than not the characters are on holiday, the books are not holiday novels as written by Arthur Ransome. They are not even stories about children. Adults play very important parts in them, and in some—I would say the best—the narrative spans several generations. No, they are not school stories or holiday stories or historical stories, although the interpretation of the past is an important theme in several; they are novels, studies of the interaction of human beings and of the reaction of people to their environment and their times.

If one must classify, these are novels for adolescent girls. (How is it that they have such a strong and personal message for me, an aged male?) Miss Arthur knows well, through her own training and experience as a teacher and a parent, what problems trouble a child. In three books she looks at the effects upon children of a parent's remarriage. Stepmothers are a byword in traditional children's stories. (pp. 240-41)

So too Miss Arthur deals, quietly and with complete integrity, with the problem of the adopted child—in Requiem for a Princess, of the orphan—in On the Wasteland, and of the coloured child—in Portrait of Margarita. She wins the respect of her readers by finding no easy solutions. On the young the burden of growing up weighs heavily and it is the writer's role to share the load, not to pretend that it is not there. A quiet unobtrusive wisdom illuminates all she says.

Miss Arthur owes this uncompromising honesty, and a toughness of spirit, to her Scottish origins and ancestry. It is the Celt in her, I suppose, which is responsible for a persistent concern with the supernatural. Only one of her books—My Daughter Nicola—is completely without a ghost, witch or some other supranormal feature. In itself this is not unusual. Plenty of writers are obsessed with the inexplicable. Miss Arthur's ghosts however are highly individual…. In An Old Magic a living gypsy's music plays on in the house where she had been happy and unhappy, sending a message to the child who is to carry on her genius.

The message of the tales is always one of continuity. "I had always known that patterns had to be complete", as Romilly says in the moving conclusion of The Autumn People, a story in which past and present are but different sides of the same coin. Romilly steps easily into the century of her own great-grandmother and indeed becomes her in the company of the Autumn People. She, like other heroines in these stories, derives her strength from "roots in the past, a recurring pattern of family life".

All Miss Arthur's wisdom and understanding would stand for naught were she not also an incomparable story-teller. She knows exactly how to squeeze the heart with suspense and to permit the relief of tears. These are not tales for escape. They are tales for involvement. Unless the reader is at one with the heroine the message is lost. But one readily surrenders to these narrators, so varied, so tough, so vulnerable. Readers will have their favourites … but they have one characteristic in common; they are all portraits from the life, not types taken from stock.

The first book to show Miss Arthur's powers in full maturity was A Candle in Her Room, her third; and it still seems to me to be in many important ways her best. Its compass is wide, covering three generations, and the construction is tight. (pp. 241-42)

This story, told by narrators of the three generations, is marvellously sustained, deeply moving, uncompromisingly true to itself. The blending of story and setting, the conflict of characters, are masterly. For me one of the dozen books of the last two decades which stands above criticism.

It is hard for a writer who peaks too soon. Succeeding books were not of this quality. They were however of their kind extremely good…. Then in 1977 Miss Arthur did it again, producing in An Old Magic the same kind of triumph she had achieved eleven years earlier in A Candle in Her Room…. Again the story is beautifully tailored, filled with absorbing and relevant detail, and action, character and setting are dovetailed in masterly fashion. (p. 243)

The theme of all the books is, in essence, self-discovery. These heroines, finding their way through the bewildering complexities of adolescence, are, each in her way, learning to distinguish between fancy and reality. At first "unsure of reality" like Harriet in After Candlemass, they in time learn to turn their attention "to real people and the worthwhile things in my real life". As Betony says, percipiently: "I think it was then that I really began to grow up". (pp. 243-44)