Eva Ibbotson - Personal Life

Personal Life

Eva Ibbotson was born Maria Charlotte Michelle Wiesner in Vienna, Austria in 1925 to non-practising Jewish parents. Her father, Berthold Wiesner, was a physician who pioneered human infertility treatment. He became a controversial figure, as he is now believed to have used his own sperm to sire perhaps 600 of the children his clinic helped to be born. Her mother, Anna Gmeyner, was a successful novelist and playwright. She had worked with Bertolt Brecht and written film scripts for G. W. Pabst.

Ibbotson's parents separated in 1928. What followed for Eva was a " very cosmopolitan, sophisticated and quite interesting, but also very unhappy childhood, always on some train and wishing to have a home," as she later recalled. Her father took up a university lectureship in Edinburgh. In 1933 her mother left Berlin for Paris in 1933, after her work was banned by Hitler, putting a sudden end to her successful writing career. In 1934 she settled in Belsize Park in North London, and sent for her daughter. Other family members also escaped from Vienna and joined Anna and Maria in London, avoiding the worst of the Nazi regime, which had already affected the family. The experience of fleeing Vienna was a strong thread throughout Ibbotson's life and work.

Maria Wiesner attended Dartington Hall School, which she later fictionalised as Delderton Hall in her novel The Dragonfly Pool (2008). Originally she intended to become a physiologist like her father, and earned an undergraduate degree from Bedford College, London, in 1945. She found the thought of spending her life conducting experiments on animals appalled her. While studying at Cambridge University, she met her future husband, Alan Ibbotson, a university professor and entomologist.