What survives of a literary career after the author’s death, monumental societal changes and the fluctuations of fictional styles and fashions? Mrs Molesworth was born in 1839 and did not die until 1921, although her writing career had effectively ended before the start of the First World War.

Her most republished works were Carrots (1876), The Cuckoo Clock (1877) and The Carved Lions (1895). Dent’s Children’s Illuminated Classics (from the 1960s) republished both the latter two as well as Charlotte M. Yonge’s Little Duke. Choosing between Cuckoo Clock and Carved Lions is hard but this reader would have to plump for the latter as well as asking for the inclusion of The Story of a Year.

While some of Mrs Molesworth’s fantasy works require a certain indulgence with their copious doses of whimsy, sentimentality and the fantastical, The Carved Lions always, always charms and soothes because of its roots in the ordinary everyday world of Manchester (Mexington) before she deploys her magic. Even the dreary old city can produce a touch of suburban pleasure for this story’s heroine Geraldine.

'It was not a very cheerful prospect before us – the gloomy, dirty streets of Mexington were now muddy and sloppy as well – though on the whole I don’t know but that they looked rather more cheerful by gaslight than in the day.'

That’s without the kindness of the Miss Fryer the Quakeress, ‘confectioner, or pastry-cook … she was grave and quiet, but we were not at all afraid of her, for we knew that she was really very kind.’ There is Geraldine’s fondness for two carved wooden lions in the entrance of Cranston’s furniture shop, ‘a pair of huge lions carved in very dark, almost black, wood they were nearly if not quite, as large as life, and the first time I saw them, when I was only four or five, I was really frightened of them. …But when mamma saw that I was frightened, she stopped and made me feel the lions and stroke them to show me that they were only wooden and could not possibly hurt me. And after that I grew very fond of them, and was always asking her to take me to the lion shop’.

But Geraldine’s world, where comfort can be found in ordinary things, is shattered when the family has to separate and Geraldine is sent unhappily to a school called Green Bank. She runs away from school, finds Cranston’s and once it is closed dozes by the side of the lions. It is then that she begins to hear the brother lions talking about her unhappiness and their plan to comfort her. Their stratagem involves a ride through the night sky – ‘overhead in the deep blue sky innumerable stars were sparkling’ - to reunite her magically with her family across the seas.

Here Mrs Molesworth mixes fantasy with psychological truth – a distraught and sorrowful young girl needing comfort and reassurance. For this reader at least The Carved Lions is a perennial favourite and especially because this enchanting tale begins in the muddy streets of Manchester.