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Tasha Tudor, a children’s illustrator whose pastel watercolors and delicately penciled lines depicted an idyllic, old-fashioned vision of the 19th-century way of life she famously pursued — including weaving, spinning, gathering eggs and milking goats — died on Wednesday at her home in Marlboro, Vt.

She was 92, if one counts only the life that began on Aug. 28, 1915. Ms. Tudor frequently said that she was the reincarnation of a sea captain’s wife who lived from 1800 to 1840 or 1842, and that it was this earlier life she was replicating by living so ardently in the past.

Her son Seth confirmed the death. He suggested that his mother’s more colorful remarks might be taken with a pinch of salt.

A cottage industry grew out of Ms. Tudor’s art, which has illustrated nearly 100 books. The family sells greeting cards, prints, plates, aprons, dolls, quilts and more, all in a sentimental, rustic, but still refined style resembling that of Beatrix Potter.

In her promotion of such a definitive lifestyle, Ms. Tudor has been called a 19th-century Martha Stewart. Books, videotapes, magazine articles and television shows illuminated her gardening and housekeeping ideas.

For 70 years her illustrations elicited wide admiration: The New York Times in 1941 said her pictures “have the same fragile beauty of early spring evenings.”

Her drawings, particularly the early ones, often illustrated the almost equally memorable stories she herself wrote. Some details: Sparrow Post, a postal service for dolls with delivery by birds. Birthday parties featuring flotillas of cakes with lighted candles. Mouse Mills catalogs, for ordering dolls clothes made by mice, who take buttons for pay.

The Catholic Library World said in 1971 that Ms. Tudor shed “a special ray of sunshine” with pictures that carry “the imagination of children into history, into the human heart, into the joys of family life, into love of friendship itself.”

Two of Ms. Tudor’s books were named Caldecott Honor Books: “Mother Goose” (1944) and “1 Is One” (1956). Ms. Tudor was just awarded the Regina Medal by the Catholic Library Association.

But it was her uncompromising immersion in another, less comfortable century that most fascinated people. She wore kerchiefs, hand-knitted sweaters, fitted bodices and flowing skirts, and often went barefoot. She reared her four children in a home without electricity or running water until her youngest turned 5. She raised her own farm animals; turned flax she had grown into clothing; and lived by homespun wisdom: sow root crops on a waning moon, above-ground plants on a waxing one.

“It is healthful to sleep in a featherbed with your nose pointing north,” she said in an interview with The Times in 1977.

Starling Burgess, who later legally changed both her names to Tasha Tudor, was born in Boston to well-connected but not wealthy parents. Her mother, Rosamond Tudor, was a portrait painter, and her father, William Starling Burgess, was a yacht and airplane designer who collaborated with Buckminster Fuller.

Ms. Tudor could not remember a time when she did not draw pictures or make little books. She was originally nicknamed Natasha by her father, after Tolstoy’s heroine in “War and Peace.” This was shortened to Tasha. After her parents divorced when she was 9, Ms. Tudor adopted her mother’s last name.

In an autobiography she wrote in 1951, Ms. Tudor said she did not start school until she was 9, although other biographies say she began as early as 7. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, for a year, but said she learned painting from her mother. Her art was often framed by ornate borders like those from a medieval manuscript, but more whimsical.

Partly to protect her from Jazz Age Greenwich Village, where her mother had moved, Ms. Tudor was sent to live with a couple in Connecticut, drama enthusiasts who included children in the plays they put on. She soon developed a love of times past and things rural, going to auctions to buy antique clothing before she was 10. At 15 she used money she had made teaching nursery school to buy her first cow.

In 1938 she married Thomas Leighton McCready Jr., who was in the real estate business. A fiddler played the wedding march. Mr. McCready encouraged his bride to put together a folio of pictures and seek publishers. She was repeatedly turned down before her first published book, “Pumpkin Moonshine” (1938), was accepted by Oxford University Press. It was the start of a flood, many still in print.

Ms. Tudor’s favorite of all her books was “Corgiville Fair,” one of several she wrote about the Welsh corgi dogs she kept as pets, sometimes 13 or 14 at once. Her 1963 illustrated version of “The Secret Garden,” by Frances Hodgson Burnett, tells of children enraptured by a mysterious garden. The volume of Clement C. Moore’s “Night Before Christmas” that she illustrated remains popular.

She rebuked those who said she must be enthralled with her own creativity.

“That’s nonsense,” she said. “I’m a commercial artist, and I’ve done my books because I needed to earn my living.”

She and her husband moved to a 19th-century farmhouse in New Hampshire that lacked electricity and running water, but did have 17 rooms and 450 acres. Ms. Tudor painted in the kitchen, in between baking bread and washing dishes. She created a dollhouse with a cast of characters, two of whom were married in a ceremony covered by Life magazine.

Ms. Tudor was divorced from Mr. McCready, who later died, and from a second husband, Allan John Woods. In 1972 she sold the New Hampshire farm and moved onto her property near her son Seth in Marlboro.

In addition to Seth, Ms. Tudor is survived by her daughters Bethany Tudor of West Brattleboro, Vt., and Efner Tudor Holmes of Contoocook, N.H.; another son, Thomas, of Fairfax, Va.; eight grandchildren; four step-grandchildren; three great-grandchildren; and her half-sister, Ann Hopps of Camden, Me.

Ms. Tudor, who could play the dulcimer and handle a gun, once promised a reporter for The Times that she could find a four-leaf clover within five minutes and came back with a five-leaf one in four minutes. She kept a seven-leaf clover framed in her room.

She told The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk in 1996 that it was her intention to go straight back to the 1830s after her death.

Tasha Tudor, Children’s Book Illustrator, Dies at 92,
NYT,
20.6.2008,
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/20/
books/20tudor.html

Roald Dahl, Writer, 74, Is Dead;

Best Sellers Enchanted Children

November 24, 1990

The New York Times

By WILLIAM H. HONAN

Roald Dahl, the best-selling British writer of macabre children's stories as well as books for adults and films, died Friday at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, England. He was 74 years old and lived in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, between Oxford and London.

He had been admitted to the hospital on Nov. 12 with an undisclosed infection, said his agent, Murray Pollinger.

Mr. Dahl wrote 19 children's books, nine collections of short stories, and numerous screenplays and television scripts. He adapted one of his best-known children's stories, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," for the screen under the title "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory." Adults as the Enemy

The key to his success, he frequently said, was to conspire with children against adults.

"It's the path to their affections," he said in an interview earlier this year with the London newspaper The Independent. "It may be simplistic, but it is the way. Parents and schoolteachers are the enemy. The adult is the enemy of the child because of the awful process of civilizing this thing that when it is born is an animal with no manners, no moral sense at all."

Roald Dahl was born in 1916 in Llandaff, South Wales, to Norwegian parents. He was educated at Repton, a private school in Derbyshire, England, and joined the Royal Air Force when World War II broke out. After training as a fighter pilot, he fought in Libya, Greece and Syria.

When he crash-landed his biplane in the Libyan desert, he suffered a fractured skull, spinal injuries and a smashed hip. His injuries required a hip replacement and two spinal operations, the last in 1947.

In the sort of macabre gesture that would later characterize his writing, he preserved the end of a femur that surgeons had removed and used it as a paperweight in his writing studio. Stories for His Own Children

It was the writer C. S. Forester, Mr. Dahl once explained to an interviewer, who started him on a literary career. Forester suggested that he write about being shot down in the desert. "Within 10 days," Mr. Dahl said, "I got a check for $1,000 from The Saturday Evening Post."

In 1953, Mr. Dahl married the actress Patricia Neal. Ms. Neal, who won an Academy Award in 1963, suffered a series of brain hemorrhages in 1965, and later credited Mr. Dahl with helping her through her slow, much-publicized recovery. He began writing stories for their children in 1960. The couple were divorced in 1983, and Mr. Dahl remarried.

Many of his books became international best sellers, and Mr. Dahl, a tall, angular figure who often sported a wry grin, became inundated with letters from children from around the world.

Apart from children's books, his preoccupation with greed, revenge and the dark side of human nature found expression in adult books like "Someone Like You," "Kiss Kiss" and "Switch Bitch."

Besides "Willy Wonka," his screenplays included "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" and a James Bond film, "You Only Live Twice." Ideas From the Mundane

Mr. Dahl did not like to talk about the source of his inspiration. "My ideas occur basically at my desk," he used to say. Or he would talk about superficial promptings like meeting the writer Ian Fleming at a dinner party, joking about the toughness of the lamb served. Later he wrote the story "Lamb to the Slaughter," about a woman who clubs her husband to death with a frozen leg of lamb, then roasts the lamb and serves it to the detectives who have come to search for the murder weapon. The story later was made into a television play by Alfred Hitchcock.

Mr. Dahl's reticence led some critics and interviewers to speculate that his fascination with the macabre derived from his war injuries. The English critic Michael Billington guessed that the writer's preoccupation with revenge and sadomasochistic relationships arose from the lashing and other forms of sanctioned brutality Mr. Dahl experienced while a pupil at an English private school. Mr. Dahl described such treatment in clinical detail in his story "Lucky Break." Livestock in the Afternoon

Settled into a writing career, he lived on a farm where he raised livestock and bred greyhounds. His routine was to write from 10 A.M. until noon, spend the afternoon tending his animals and return to his writing again from 4 to 6 P.M.

His writing was far from effortless. He commonly spent six months working on a single short story.

In 1982, when the British Parliament was in an uproar over the fact that a prowler had sneaked into Buckingham Palace and sat on Queen Elizabeth's bed for 10 minutes before being discovered, one of Mr. Dahl's books was suspected of being the inspiration.

He had recently sent his publishers "The B.F.G.," a children's book about a Big Friendly Giant who kidnaps a girl from an orphanage and deposits her in the Queen's bedroom "with the Queen herself asleep in there behind the curtain not more than five yards away."

But Mr. Dahl was soon absolved of responsibility when it was determined that his book had been circulated only within the publishing industry. The perpetrator of the actual break-in could not have been prompted by the book, one editor said, "unless he's a reader for the Book-of-the-Month Club."

However unjustified, the suspicion was characteristic of some of the negative reaction to Mr. Dahl's work. Not a few critics denounced his books as ugly, antisocial, brutish and antifeminist.

Mr. Dahl scoffed at them, remarking: "I never get any protests from children. All you get are giggles of mirth and squirms of delight. I know what children like."

He is survived by his second wife, Felicity Ann Crosland, and three children from his marriage to Miss Neal: a son, Theo, and two daughters, Tessa and Ophelia. A third daughter, Olivia, died in 1962.

Roald Dahl, Writer, 74, Is Dead; Best Sellers Enchanted Children,
NYT,
24.11.1990,
https://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/24/
obituaries/
roald-dahl-writer-74-is-dead-
best-sellers-enchanted-children.html

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