Mary Hoffman was born in a “dull little town” which grew up around the railways. Her father worked for the railways, as did all the males of the family on both sides. Just before she was three, her family moved to London, where her father had a job in an office under the ground at Waterloo (which could only be reached by a maze of subterranean passages).

At Primary School she wrote plays which her friends performed. When she passed the 11+, Mary went on to an independent girls’ school in Dulwich on a scholarship — which was a big culture shock. In 1964 she went up to Cambridge (Newnham College) to read English Literature and in 1968-70 took a diploma in linguistics at University College London.

 In 1970 she started writing her first book, which was published in 1975 as White Magic. Since then, she has written more than eighty books for children, including the picturebook Amazing Grace , the Stravaganza series of novels. Sheco- edited the anti-war anthology Lines in the Sand, with her daughter Rhiannon Lassiter.

Here she talks to Nikki Gamble about the success of Amazing Grace explains why fifteen years on there is still work to be done in challenging the role models and aspirations that are presented to young girls.

In 1991, when Amazing Grace was first published, it was a ground breaking book because it raised awareness of the unexamined bias in everyday education practice. Grace wants to be Peter Pan in the school play but her class mates tell her that it isn’t possible because she’s a girl and she is black. Were you surprised that it was still necessary in the 1990s to address these issues?

 It is extraordinary that it was still necessary in the early 90s. I started getting interested in sexism and racism in children’s books in the early 70s, when I joined the Women’s Movement. Encouraged by the movement I got involved in an children’s book interest group, because I was, at the time, striving to write my first children’s book. We looked at lots of picture books, from the feminist point of view, and found them sadly lacking both in the depiction of girls and adult women. We developed an informal subgroup, which we called CISSY: the Campaign to Impede Sex Stereotyping the Young. That was a joke really because it seemed that all groups had to have these strange acronyms.

Then in 1973 we joined up with Rosemary Stones and Andrew Mann at the Children’s Rights Workshop. They were looking at race and class. Together we met and talked with publishers about the issues. So, I had been waving the flag for sometime before Amazing Grace was published.

When the book was published in 1991, I assumed things were getting better. But it was still the case, I was told that in the States in particular, that Amazing Grace was the first picture book with a black child on the front to be bought people of all colours and ethnicities. I think there was something very striking about Caroline’s wonderful illustration of Grace on the front cover that really helped to get the book noticed.

Can you tell us the story of Amazing Grace came to be written?

I wrote, “Once upon a time there was a little girl called Grace who loved stories.”  I’ve often said since that it’s not quite as momentous as, “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit,” but it was almost like that for me because it really did change the nature of my career.

Amazing Grace was a book that started from the title, as they sometimes do. I wondered what a book with the title Amazing Grace would be about. In what way was Grace going to be amazing? I knew the story would to be on a small domestic scale and that she would be amazing by overcoming obstacles. So that raised another question: what kind of obstacles? I thought that things had changed a lot since I’d been a girl at primary school and that people didn’t say, ‘well you can’t do that because you’re a girl’. My impression was that the feminism wasn’t so necessary, so there would need to be other obstacles for her to overcome. That’s when I decided she should be a black child in a black family.

Regarding finding a publisher, I knew Janetta Otter-Barry from the days when I had written for Methuen and I knew she had a passion for multicultural publishing. So, when she left Methuen to start the children’s list at Frances Lincoln that seemed to me to be the perfect home for Grace.

I actually finished the first draft one day in the Sanctuary spa in Covent Garden. It was quite expensive but my money was well spent that day.

I had a pretty good idea who could illustrate it. Caroline Binch had already illustrated the cover for an anthology I had edited. So I knew she could depict Grace and her family. I had no idea at that point whether she was black or white. In fact she is white but I later found out that she had spent quite a lot of time in Africa. I also didn’t know if she had worked on a picturebook before and it turned out that she hadn’t. At the time she was working on Rosa Guy’s Billy the Great so we were lucky to get her.

Although the book was slow to pick up here, it took off tremendously in the States. The message “You can be anything you want if you put your mind to it…” was perfect for them. That wasn’t my conscious intention. Grace is just me: she’s a little girl who loves stories, and nothing is going to get in her way. That’s what it is really about.

That’s interesting hearing you talk about the similarities between yourself and Grace because I also see something of you in Grandma.

It’s very interesting that you should say that, because I was a child who grew up without any grandparents. I really missed that experience, and romanticised the idea of grandparents. In fact I used to collect substitute grandparents.

 My family think the wise remarks that Nana makes are terribly funny and they say about certain things that people say, “Oh, that’s a Grace’s grandmother remark.” She’s very calm and very wise, always has the right solution to any problem - which is completely unlike me. So she’s like my ego ideal.

 Nana’s the one who really expresses the wisdom that lies at the core of the book.

That’s right. In the new book Princess Grace the wisdom is that “There’s more than one way of being pretty.”

But I suppose I’m also Ma, the harassed working mother. It’s a version of the tripartite goddess: the young virgin, the nubile woman and the crone. I have been the first two, and I guess, now, I’m on the way to being a crone.

The Grace books present a very affirming image of the family.

I hope so. When I wrote the first text, there was a baby brother, and although I had never mentioned a father, the assumption might have been that this was an average two parent two children family. However, Caroline works from real-life subjects, and she had found a family that consisted of a daughter, the mother and the grandmother. The child was being raised by her mother as a single parent. I was asked whether I felt he was important to the story and I said, “No, he’s not,” He was called Benjamin and I was able to bring him back to life later on.

So what happened next? When did you decide to write a sequel?

Well, the first book had done so enormously well, and the American publisher was very keen to have a sequel. But the family Caroline used had moved to the Gambia. So that was one issue, and the other was that I didn’t want to do a sequel until I had a story. When I mentioned to Frances Lincoln that the family had moved and we wouldn’t be able to do the sequel, she said, “Well, not necessarily. You know, we’ll pay for you and Caroline to go out.”

What an offer! Where is the Gambia exactly?

If you think of that big lump that is on the west of Africa, and you then take a line along the middle of it, going towards the centre, that roughly  is the River . Tthen the Gambia is a long thin country running along the river. It was along that river that Alex Haley travelled to find the village where he found his roots. All around it is Senegal, which was a former French colony. So the language spoken there is French. The Gambians speak English, in addition to the native languages.

 Did you know what the story of Grace and Family would be before you went there?

Yes, I had an idea for the second story. I thought that the reason the father wasn’t mentioned could be because he was far away in Africa, and that he had a second family. Caroline had been in touch with the family and lined someone up to model as Grace’s father.

How important was the African setting for you?

The first draft was written like a travelogue but when I thought about it, I realised it was extraneous to the story, which is about coping with family relationships. It’s about a child beginning to see herself not as  the point at which two families pull apart, but the point at which two families join. Africa just gives a wonderful background to the story. I

It’s important to know when to hold back when you are telling a story not to give too much information. One of the things I appreciate in Grace is the writerly gaps that you leave, which allow readers to bring their own experiences to the text. For instance, when Grace’s father asks her if she would like to hear the story about how he and her mother came to part, she puts her hands over her ears and says, “I don’t want to hear that story.”

Yes, it’s exactly the same with the wishing on the crocodile. Grace has a wish, but she doesn't say what it is. It’s absolutely crucial that the child reading the story lets Grace wish what they would wish. At the very beginning of the story Grace would wish for her parents to get back together. I think that Grace knows, after spending time with her father and Jatu and the two children, that’s not going to happen. So I think she wishes something else. Having said that, even I don’t even know what she wishes.

And working on a picturebook text you also have to leave some gaps for the pictures.

Yes, you have not to say, “Oh, a tall elf with a silver robe and long beard came out of the forest, because a picture will tell you that and then there is nothing left for the artist to do. I do think visually when I write for picturebooks. The way I work is to write the text and then write in brackets how I imagine the picture might be, albeit on the understanding that it is the artist’s job to create the pictures, and they can change things completely.

After that you moved on to the Grace story books.

Well ‘Grace’ had grown up and her Ma had died tragically of meningitis, so Caroline no longer had models for the pictures. The story books didn’t need illustrating and Caroline had enough material she could use for the covers.

When we came to the third picturebook there were two problems. Firstly, who was going to illustrate it? Secondly we couldn’t include anything that had not happened by the time of the three storybooks because Grace is older in those stories. For instance, Ma couldn’t have a boyfriend, because it happens later.

But you did produce a third picturebook, and again you have a very clever title, Princess Grace.

Yes, it was one of those titles that popped into my head quite suddenly. Then the idea followed of using Grace to challenge the ghastly preoccupation with pink and princesses and glitter and fairies. It’s such a limited set of aspirations for young girls.

You must wonder how far we’ve come since the 1970s?

If anything, it’s worse. Part of my plan on writing this book, was to get an article placed in as high profile a position. I have had an idea for an article accepted by The Guardian called Down with Princesses.

In this book Nana tells Grace, “Perhaps you’re not reading the right stories.” Do you agree that the stories that are collected and retold, tend to be the same ones. The repertoire becomes narrower instead of broader?

Do you remember, many years ago there was a book published by Alison Lurie called Clever Gretchen, which included stories like Kate Crackernuts and Brave Molly-Whuppy. It was full of the feisty heroines of traditional stories. Amd I wrote a picturebook for Barefoot called Clever Katya, which is a Russian fairy tale, in which a seven year old girl outwits the grownups. The material is there, but there’s still a prevalence of passivity in stories like Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White, where the heroines are awoken by a kiss.

That was the trouble with the whole Princess Diana affair. Every report of that wedding, referred to it as a fairy tale wedding, and she was a fairy tale bride. We know how that fairy tale ended; it turned very ugly. It was the wrong set of expectations. The only opportunity that most young women get to be princesses is on their wedding day, so they hand over shed-loads of money to the dreadful wedding industry. I’m told now the average cost for a wedding is £18,000, which goes a long way towards a decent deposit on a small one bedroom flat in London.

Howver, I would hate anyone to think that I don’t not want girls to read traditional princess stories. I do. I just want them to be offered a much broader and richer range of stories.

I think Princess Grace is a book for teachers as well as children. Grace is fortunate to have a good teacher who can make lots of creative suggestions when she’s asked about other types of princess.

Good teachers do take on board what the children have to say, and respond spontaneously.

Nana’s a teacher too, I think. She’s very good at questioning and guiding Grace to find her own solutions to her problems

So Grace has appeared in picturebooks and storybooks are there any other plans for her?

The Children’s Theatre in Minneapolis have produced two stage plays. I’ve been to see them both, and have been terribly impressed by how they managed to get a whole evening’s entertainment out of a 32 page picturebook. The sets and the costumes were based entirely on Caroline’s paintings. The shows included music and dancing. I had a transatlantic three-way conversation with the producer and the writer of the first play, in which they’d asked me questions like, “What does Grace’s mother do for a living?” So I said, quick as a flash, I said, “She works in a hospital.”

Are there any more Grace books for us to look forward to?

That rather depends on whether I have a story to tell.

http://www.maryhoffman.co.uk/

Thank you Mary Hoffman for talking to Write Away.