Ruby Ferguson - The "Jill" Books

The "Jill" Books

The "Jill" books are a series of nine children's novels about young equestrienne Jill Crewe and her adventures with her two ponies, Black Boy and Rapide. The series was illustrated with line drawings by Caney, and have only recently gone out of print. Fidra Books intend to republish the series, and like their previous works, it will use the original text. In recent editions, small changes were made to the background details to make the books more accessible to later generations; references to cigarette smoking were excised, for example, and "Black Boy" became the more politically correct "Danny Boy". The series takes the protagonist from the age of eleven to seventeen, from a pony novice to a prize-winning rider.

In the first book in the series, Jill's Gymkhana, Jill's father has recently died, and she moves with her mother to a small cottage near the fictional village of Chatton. Her mother hopes to support them both as a children's author (shades of E. Nesbit's classic The Railway Children). Jill is at first a social outcast in "horsy" Chatton because she doesn't own a pony and can't ride. When her mother's stories finally begin to sell, however, the first thing she buys is a pony for her daughter. With hard work and the expert assistance of Martin Lowe, a wheelchair-using former Royal Air Force pilot, Jill becomes a star of Chatton equitation.

Jill is grateful for her mother's success; however, as she says repeatedly throughout the series, she "can't get on" with her mother's books at all, finding them impossibly sweet and whimsical (possibly a veiled criticism of the works of Enid Blyton). In contrast, Ferguson's Jill is an active, independent and witty character who defies post-war expectations for English girls by scorning ladylike pursuits, treating boys her own age as equals, and working hard to achieve her goals. This makes Ferguson's writing outstanding not only in the pony stories genre, but in children's literature generally.