All remain in print and have been widely translated.Īrthur Ransome died in June 1967 and is buried at Rusland in the Lake District. Today Ransome is best known for his Swallows and Amazons series of novels, (1931 - 1947). Settling in the Lake District, he spent the late 1920s as a foreign correspondent and highly-respected angling columnist for the Manchester Guardian, before settling down to write Swallows and Amazons and its successors. Ransome married Evgenia and returned to England in 1924. These contacts led to persistent but unproven accusations that he "spied" for both the Bolsheviks and Britain. He knew many of the leading Bolsheviks, including Lenin, Radek, Trotsky and the latter's secretary, Evgenia Shvelpina. Petersburg, where he was ideally placed to observe and report on the Russian Revolution. He used this precarious existence to practice writing, producing several minor works before Bohemia in London (1907), a study of London's artistic scene and his first significant book.Īn interest in folklore, together with a desire to escape an unhappy first marriage, led Ransome to St. In 1902, Ransome abandoned a chemistry degree to become a publisher's office boy in London. a book to buy, to read, and to read again, not once but many times.” The Guardian put it “in a class by itself.” For Ransome, unlike so many writers of his and our generation, was particular in writing about things he knew and had studied first-hand, whether it was a foreign culture, a classical language, a cryptographic code, or the finer points of seamanship.Īrthur Michell Ransome (Janu– June 3, 1967) was an English author and journalist. (It’s no accident that, like so many of Ransome’s protagonists, Missee Lee is a woman, or that her Latin is almost as refined as her sailing skills.) It is also no wonder that The Observer called this, the tenth book in the series, “his best yet.
Here he takes the reader not only on the usual sailing adventures and cliff-hanging escapades, but also into Chinese culture. Ransome is, as always, the consummate storyteller. But when her father takes ill and dies, she finds herself struggling to hold together the Three Island Confederation (Tiger, Turtle, and Dragon) he had created, and to be recognized as his legitimate heir and ruler of the Island Kingdom.
But Missee Lee, as it turns out, is no ordinary pirate her father had sent her off to Cambridge University to prepare her for a life as a teacher. They make their way to land, only to find themselves the captives of one of the last remaining pirates operating off the China Coast. In minutes, the ship is ablaze (and doomed), and our seven luckless protagonists are adrift in two small boats. The original cast of the famed Swallows and Amazons series is sailing under the stars and the command of Captain Flint in the South China Sea when Gibbet, their pet monkey, grabs the captain’s cigar and drops it in the fuel tank.
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