Uttley's, much earlier book:)Ī group of siblings visit their aunt and uncle in a country farmhouse for a time and Penelope, who is a dreamer, finds herself traveling through time and connecting with the people who used to live in this place in the 1500's. Tolkien's favorites:) And since everyone who loves stories of this sort likes to compare them to Narnia, I would say that C.S.
The book itself was published in 1939 and the author was one of J. I love the way this author tells a children's story! It has the feel of a fairy tale, but using time travel as a means to connect a girl living in the 1930's Chelsea, England with the 16th century Tudor period. And while the pace of A Traveller in Time is definitely rather slow and descriptive, this is to and for me precisely what has always made this novel such a constant and perennial favourite (although yes, if a potential reader really does need and require constant action and adventure, then A Traveller in Time would likely not be that good a choice or that successful a reading fit). However, as Penelope is caught up in the life and times of a rural Tudor manor house and the Babingtons' striving to save Mary Queen of Scots, both her and also the reader's infatuation with especially young and dashing Francis Babington is clouded by the knowledge of the future (of British history), that the family's plot to free Mary Queen of Scots from imprisonment is doomed to epically fail (and the first time I read A Traveller in Time knowing what would happen, being painfully aware of the fact that the Babingtons would not succeed, did bother me a tiny bit, but it also piqued my historical interest and made me engage in supplemental research on Tudor England which definitely helped me in grade nine when we were taking the history of the British and Scottish monarchies in Social Studies).Īlthough readers not all that versed in Tudor history (and especially the religious conflicts of the time between Church of England Queen Elizabeth I and her Roman Catholic cousin Mary Queen of Scots) might time find A Traveller in Time potentially a trifle difficult and challenging, the novel is indeed (and in my humble opinion) a simply and utterly wonderful, enlightening sojourn and romp, not only into the past to which Penelope travels, but also into 1930s rural Derbyshire from where or perhaps more to the point from whence Penelope opens her aunt's farmhouse doors into the past, into Tudor era Derbyshire. As a young and lonely teenager, I both dreamed of and desperately wanted to open a door and be magically transported into the past and thus Allison Uttley's A Traveller in Time (where young Penelope Taberner does precisely that) was right up my proverbial alley so to speak (especially since she is transported into the past of the United Kingdom).
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