Many characters appear throughout the series and the dustwrappers include a message from Lorna Hill instructing you to read the books in order, to avoid a hopeless muddle. Woven into the ballet stories is a great deal of romance and many descriptions of place: London, Northumberland, Italy, Switzerland.

After years of hard work, she leaves the corps de ballet and becomes a ballerina. By a wonderful stroke of luck, she is ‘spotted’ by someone who sees her potential and passes into the Sadler’s Wells ballet school (later The Royal Ballet School). A girl longs to dance but something prevents her: poverty, relatives who are against it, even (in the most unlikely of all the stories), physical disability. I could list any number of other ballet stories including one by Rumer Godden, yet still people enjoy Lorna Hill’s books and some have been reprinted by Girls Gone By.Įach ‘Junior Novel’ follows a similar formula. One of my favourite more modern ballet books is Dance for Two by Jean Ure. Adèle Geras has written a modern series of ballet books. Mabel Esther Allen (as Jean Estoril) wrote eleven books in her Drina series, as well as the Ballet Family books. Noel Streatfeild’s Ballet Shoes (1936) is the enduring stage classic for girls but she didn’t write a series, as others have done. Had you been ten-year-old me and reading Girl comic, you could have followed the weekly adventures of Belle of the Ballet and your Christmas annual would include a colour plate of Margot Fonteyn, a household name. Ballet had a much higher popular profile in the 1950s than it does today. In tandem with those, she wrote another dancing series, Dancing Peel, but it was never as successful. They were later reprinted in paperback and are still popular today. Lorna Hill published fourteen books about the ‘Wells’ between 19. This photo was taken a long time ago, when I was recording my books before moving.

A Dream of Sadler's Wells by Lorna Hill