Marianne Dreams

Product Information

Catherine Storr (1913-2001) was an English children's writer, best known for her novel Marianne Dreams and for the Clever Polly series. She was born in London, and attended St Paul's Girls' School, and went on to study English literature at Newnham College, Cambridge. She tried unsuccessfully to become a novelist but without giving up this ambition she studied medicine, qualifying as a doctor in 1944. She worked at the Middlesex Hospital. Afterwards, while regularly producing new children's books, she also worked as an editorial assistant for Penguin Books, from 1966 to the early seventies. She married in 1942 and had had three daughters. She divorced in 1970 and remarried the economist Lord Balogh (1905-1985).

Marianne Dreams (Literature) - TV Tropes

A podcast in which one film lecturer and one scaredy-cat discuss creepy, spooky and disturbing children's books, films and tv. What happens when a recurring dream becomes so lucid and involving that it feels more like reality than the everyday? Does the dream – unsettling as it is – become a more valid state of existence than the dreamer’s waking life? Ali: That was my favourite bit of the film. That was the bit where I got on board with the film properly. When she opens the door and on the stairs there’s just this pair of plaster legs. It’s great. Adam: But the objects still turn out fairly realistically, as she intends them. Whereas in the film you get the sense that the objects are disproportioned because she’s drawn them disproportioned. Ren: There’s quite a big time difference between when the book was published and when the film was made, so there’s some updates to bring it into the ‘80s.And I wonder if that’s something that the book has and understands, that the book doesn’t, perhaps.

Paperhouse (film) - Wikipedia Paperhouse (film) - Wikipedia

When she wakes up the next morning, she realises that the house she had drawn was identical to the house in her dream - she draws the stairs.

The book contains examples of the following tropes:

Ali: Yeah, which is obviously the most horrifying thing that anyone’s ever invented. It had something of that about it. Ali: I think if they’d done that to start with then it wouldn’t have been scary, but because that’s pretty late on, when they’re making their escape to the lighthouse. By that point I felt like I was invested enough in the thing for that to be sinister.

Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr - LoveReading4Kids

There’s a force in this place. You felt it in the cold wind and now it is in them. It pulls at you, pulls all the energy. I think it would pull the light from the sky if it could.’ In the book she gets ill, and as a consequence of that she finds the pencil and starts drawing, but the worst part of her illness is before that, and it doesn’t feel like the reason she’s having these dreams is because she’s ill. Whereas in the film it definitely seems to be the case. Mark. Yet Storr has created a ghost story without any of the traditional horror but one that is scary enough in its own I’ll draw a picture of Mark feeling quite well again. Only I suppose then I’ll have to dream about him again, and I don’t want to. I don’t see why I should have to dream about him - why can’t he get well without my having to see him? Perhaps I could just draw him looking quite well, but not in that house, which is where I always seem to get to. And then he probably wouldn’t believe I’d done anything about it, he’d think it had all just happened, and what I’d done didn’t make any difference at all!’

Ali: I really liked the grass. The grass is genuinely described as being malign. Right from the beginning when she finds herself out in the grass, and also later when she has to hide in the grass, during the escape from the house, there’s definitely a feeling that the grass is watching and it’s not on the children’s side. She draws a face in the window of the house, and when she goes into the dream, there is a boy there, named Mark. It turns out that he is a real person, who is being taught by the same tutor as her, and he can’t walk because he’s suffering from polio. So, in Paperhouse, it’s a similar setup, Anna draws her father and then decides she’s drawn him wrong and scribbles his face out. Anna keeps mentioning her father, and how she wants to see him, but we also find out that in the past he’s been drunk, and there’s some implication that he’s been threatening. Or Anna, at least says ‘I don’t like him when he’s drunk’.