Celebrate the Author: Tasha Tudor
Tasha Tudor is an author and illustrator I’ve become more aware of as an adult. Her birthday is August 28, 1915, and I chose her for my author this month in the Celebrate the Author Challenge because my daughters and I have checked her books out of the library and thoroughly enjoyed them. Often compared to Beatrix Potter for her illustrative style and citizenship in an earlier era, one key difference between the two authors is that Ms. Tudor’s books are more sentimental and idealized. They’re nostalgia at its best, as far as I’m concerned — the kind that throws a golden haze over the past and makes you indulge in a longing for a more innocent time.
Our favorites (so far) are A Time to Keep, Give Us This Day, and The Dolls’ Christmas. All are illustrated with Ms. Tudor’s warmly lit, detailed watercolors that often frame the text in a delicate visual counterpoint. A Time to Keep is about the holidays of the year, and it recounts the charming celebrations and traditions of the past. It’s a magical place where people make all sorts of beautiful handmade gifts, float birthday cakes down streams with all the candles lit, have fabulous picnics, and the like. Nearly every page is populated with a thriving community of children. Isolation, loneliness, drab industrial settings, broken families — none of these figure into this world. Imagination, joy, cooperation, and harmony between generations prevail. It’s a gorgeous book, and one that equips you to rethink your own traditions and priorities.
Give Us This Day is the text of Lord’s Prayer — William Tyndale’s 16th century translation — embellished with Ms. Tudor’s illustrations. Publishers Weekly complains that it instills a hellfire and damnation conception of God, but it certainly didn’t have that effect on my kids. Children and corgis frolic through the pages, each of which is beautifully bordered. The pictures illustrating parts of the prayer that speak of needing forgiveness or deliverance from evil suggest the darker side of experience, as well they should if religion has anything to do with the real world. But the dominant mode of the book is extremely gentle, and the illustrations make the archaic text accessible.
The Dolls’ Christmas stars two carefully kept dolls with beautiful clothes and a fully equipped home — the mother of all dollhouses! Pumpkin House is as big as the two little girls who play with it, ornately accessorized without a trace of plastic. I never played with dolls growing up, but this book would make me reconsider (or, more likely, would tempt me to become a dollhouse collector, furnishing my dream home on a small scale). I like the way the book teaches children how to play in a more structured way; my girls are energetic players, and this book lays out a more sedate alternative, equally as imaginative as riding in a rodeo through the house, but QUIETER. (Oh, and by the way… it’s a nice story too. :-)
All this talk of the nostalgia, the gentleness, and the sentimentality of Ms. Tudor’s books probably makes it unsurprising that I pictured this author in very stereotypical terms: a grandmotherly woman, smelling of baby powder, practiced in the disciplines of a producer rather than a consumer, who lived a life as idyllic as that depicted in her stories. The photos I’ve seen of this author have cooperated with this view. But in reading about Ms. Tudor, I did find a few facts that surprised me, and began to bring her out of the dusty museum case of a stereotype and into the more multidimensional world of human beings:
- Her name at birth was Starling Burgess; she changed it to Tasha Tudor
- Her parents divorced
- She was herself married and divorced twice
- She raised her four children in a farmhouse without electricity or running water until her youngest was 5
- She believed herself to be reincarnated, formerly a wife of a sea captain in the early 1800′s; this is the era she emulated in her own lifestyle
- She died just a few months short of her 93rd birthday, on June 18 of this year
Some links of interest:
