Joan G. Robinson (1910–1988)

A gentle and charming ghost story set on the North Norfolk coast.

Anna is a lonely foster child, who feels very 'outside' the warm relationships of others. While convalescing on the Norfolk coast, she meets Marnie, also lonely and excluded, and the two become firm friends. There is a lovely sense of place with the marshes and the dunes. The explanations at the end come very thick and fast compared to the gentle pace of the rest of the book, and while they are a bit coincidental, they are satisfying. I think I will not walk down the staithe again without imagining Marnie, pale at the window!… (altro)

”It was raining harder now and she was beginning to get wet, but it did not matter. She was warm inside. She turned and began running back along the dyke, thinking how strange it was—about being ‘inside’ or ‘outside’. It was nothing to do with there being other people, or whether you were ‘an only’, or one of a large family . . . she knew that now—it was something to do with how you were feeling inside yourself.”

Anna is around ten and absolutely friendless. Unable to connect with the other children at school or bond with the older foster parents she’s lived with for some years, she is profoundly unhappy. Her characteristic expression is the “ordinary” face: an appearance of indifference and haughty detachment. She hates the mother who left her to go off on a holiday with a second husband, only to die along with this man in a car crash, and she also hates the grandmother she was left with for dying soon after. After being away from school for two weeks, suffering from asthma that is likely psychosomatic in nature, Anna is sent by her foster parents, the Prestons, to stay with the Peggs, an endearing, warm couple who live in Little Overton in the fen country. The family doctor has stated that the air there may well do her good. It certainly makes more sense for her to be there than spend the last six weeks of term in the prison that is school.

Once in the marshy country, Anna is given an enviable degree of freedom. She explores the marshlands and is particularly compelled by a lovely old house that looks out onto the creek and the straithe. There is a strange, deep familiarity about this place, whose windows Anna sometimes believes to be watching her. Soon she will make the acquaintance of an unusual—magical or ghostly—girl. “Marnie”, who is just as lonely as Anna herself, lives in the mysterious house. The two will become each other’s best friend and will have several small adventures together, but then Marnie will quite suddenly depart, leaving Anna to question if the other girl is a figment of the imagination or a character from some strange dream.

When summer finally (officially) arrives, a lovely, friendly family with five children moves into the mysterious Marsh House. Their renovations of the old place bring to light a diary from long ago that will explain much about Marnie. The Lindsay family will also invite an elderly friend to stay. This woman, “Gillie”, lived in Little Overton as a child, and has fascinating stories to tell about the Marsh House and the lonely girl who lived there over fifty years before, during the time of the Great War. Anna will find her intuited connection to the house is based in her own family’s history.

When Marnie Was There is a lovely, atmospheric piece of children’s literature into which adults, too, can escape to rediscover some of the pain and pleasure of childhood. It is a story of feeling lonely and apart and of finally coming home.… (altro)