Celia: Here at Writers Review we were deeply saddened to hear of the death of our good friend, Mary Hooper. Mary’s death on 24th May this year was a shock to us all. She was not just a literary colleague but a friend, always there to celebrate, when celebrations were in order and commiserate when they were not. I had known her for over thirty years. She was an early member of the Scattered Authors’ Society, which is where I first met her. She was a regular participant in SAS get togethers and lunches in London with fellow authors Linda Newbery, Adèle Geras, Jean Ure, Anne Cassidy and Sally Prue. Mary was always excellent company and only ceased attending after her diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease made travel difficult for her.
She and I both wrote historical fiction for Bloomsbury Children’s Books and were often paired together for events. Mary was very good company, ebulliently funny and always very supportive, on the platform and off it. We did some memorable events together all over the country. Mary was just the same, large audience or small, her warm, engaging personality came over, as did her knowledge of her subject, which was second to none.
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| Fallen Grace, nominated for the Carnegie Medal |
She was a prolific writer, with over a hundred titles for children and young adults. Her main focus was writing for teenage girls. That focus continued when she moved, extremely successfully, into historical fiction and this is what I know her for best. She won multiple awards and was nominated for the Carnegie Medal. Her research was always meticulous but her real talent was to make her characters come alive on the page. She was fascinated by women’s past lives and her range was wide, from the 17th Century to the First World War. Her most acclaimed novel and one of our personal favourites, Newes From The Dead, was based on an obscure historical footnote, the true story of Anne Green, a woman who was hanged at Oxford Assizes and who came back from the dead on an Oxford University dissecting table. Mary took this snippet of historical fact and spun it into an extraordinary story of survival and resilience.
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| Newes from the Dead, based on a historical incident |
Although she set her historical fiction in different periods, all her novels are in different ways celebrations of the lives of ordinary girls and women, the people that history too often ignores and forgets. Whether they are servant girls or shopkeepers, Mary made sure that the lives of her heroines were discovered. I know as a fellow writer of historical fiction how much work and research uncovering those lives takes and how much deep understanding and empathy it takes to make these girls and women live for modern young readers. The world of children’s and young adult fiction is the poorer for her passing. She will be mourned and missed by her fellow writers and I have lost an old and valued friend.
Jean: Mary was one of my oldest writing chums – oldest, that is, in the sense that we went back a long way, sharing moments of triumph and moments of authorial outrage (mostly to do with editorial and/or publishing iniquities). I look back fondly to all those happy, gossipy lunches we had with old friends such as Adele Geras, Celia Rees, Linda Newbery and Anne Cassidy, all of us happily moaning about said iniquities.
Mary was very down to earth – even, occasionally, dismissive when it came to her own writing. “Oh,” she once airily said, when I was complaining that I didn’t know how to wind up one of my books, “I just pile all my characters into a boat and have it capsize, or kill them off in a cash crash.”
In fact she used to do a lot of research for the historical novels, such as Newes from the Dead, having belatedly taken a history degree to make up for having, as she said, spent her schooldays giggling and talking “far too much” to concentrate on learning anything.
She was a lively and amusing correspondent – I could always rely on her to lighten the mood and give me something to laugh about.
She is a sad loss and I shall miss her terribly.
Mary was very down to earth – even, occasionally, dismissive when it came to her own writing. “Oh,” she once airily said, when I was complaining that I didn’t know how to wind up one of my books, “I just pile all my characters into a boat and have it capsize, or kill them off in a cash crash.”
In fact she used to do a lot of research for the historical novels, such as Newes from the Dead, having belatedly taken a history degree to make up for having, as she said, spent her schooldays giggling and talking “far too much” to concentrate on learning anything.
She was a lively and amusing correspondent – I could always rely on her to lighten the mood and give me something to laugh about.
She is a sad loss and I shall miss her terribly.
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| Poppy, winner of the Young Quills Historical Association Award |
See also Mary's Guardian obituary by her daughter Rowan.
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