Best-known for creating Milly-Molly-Mandy, Joyce Lankester Brisley’s Bunchy, though equally charming, is often overlooked. The ten stories about her pre-school life with her grandmother capture the simplicity of childhood imagination and play. Feeling lonely, Bunchy makes a pastry doll to be a playmate; bringing in the clothes pegs, Bunchy realises that they can be dressed and turned into little play people. It’s simple, domestic stuff with a period feel that quaint but not off putting.
Bunchy lives all alone with her grandmother in a cottage in the country. But Bunchy is never lonely - how can she be with all her special friends? The pastry girl, the Scribbles family, who started life on the back of an envelope, the naughty clothes-peg people who almost made Bunchy fall off the clothesline! - and of course the little wooden sailor-doll...
Joyce Lankester Brisley (1896-1978) was born in Bexhill, England. Her first stories about Milly-Molly-Mandy were printed in 1925 in the Christian Science Monitor, and a collection appeared in book form in 1928. She wrote and illustrated six collections of stories about Milly-Molly-Mandy. The Milly-Molly-Mandy Storybook was published in the UK in September 1996. She also illustrated books by other authors, including the classic Ursula Moray Williams story, Adventures of a Little Wooden Horse.
