Growing up the hard way | 14 February 2013

Like the gingerbread house, these three novels seem at first to be a delightful and innocent place, entirely suitable for the three not-quite orphaned young girls who are Holden’s heroines. But, just as in a fairytale, safety is never assured. The very grown-ups who should be offering protection — a governess, a head teacher, even their own mother — may become suddenly unstable and capricious. What looks bright and cheery and full of hope may turn out to be perilous, even sinister. Home is not a constant. Written with an engaging immediacy, these are stories about children but, with their dark secrets, their frightening reversals, their alarming glimpses of sex and death, they are certainly not for children.

Ursula Holden didn’t publish her first novel until she was well into her fifties, and hasn’t brought out a book since 1991. Born in 1921, she lives in a nursing home in London.