The Harry Potter books are frequently compared to the works of Diana Wynne Jones. Foremost amongst the latter are The Tough Guide To Fantasyland, and its fictional companion-pieces Dark Lord of Derkholm (1998) and Year of the Griffin (2000), which provide a merciless (though not unaffectionate) critique of formulaic sword-and-sorcery epics. Jones' books range from amusing slapstick situations to sharp social observation (Changeover is both), to witty parody of literary forms. In 1965, when Rhodesia declared independence unilaterally (one of the last colonies and not tiny), 'I felt as if the book were coming true as I wrote it.' It is a farce with a large cast of characters, featuring government, police, and army bureaucracies sex, politics, and news. It originated as the British Empire was divesting colonies she recalled in 2004 that it had 'seemed like every month, we would hear that yet another small island or tiny country had been granted independence.'Changeover is set in a fictional African colony during transition, and begins as a memo about the problem of how to 'mark changeover' ceremonially is misunderstood to be about the threat of a terrorist named Mark Changeover.

Her first book was a novel for adults published by Macmillan in 1970, entitled Changeover. Beside the children, she felt harried by the crises of adults in the household: a sick husband, a mother-in-law, a sister, and a friend with daughter. Jones started writing during the mid-1960s 'mostly to keep my sanity', when the youngest of her three children was about two years old and the family lived in a house owned by an Oxford college.

After a brief period in London, in 1957 the couple returned to Oxford, where they stayed until moving to Bristol in 1976.Īccording to her autobiography, Jones decided she was an atheist when she was a child. In the same year she married John Burrow, a scholar of medieval literature, with whom she had three sons, Richard, Michael and Colin. After attending the Friends School Saffron Walden, she studied English at St Anne's College in Oxford, where she attended lectures by both C. There, Jones and her two younger sisters Isobel (later Professor Isobel Armstrong, the literary critic) and Ursula (later an actress and a children's writer) spent a childhood left chiefly to their own devices. In 1943 her family finally settled in Thaxted, Essex, where her parents worked running an educational conference centre.

When war was announced, shortly after her fifth birthday, she was evacuated to Wales, and thereafter moved several times, including periods in Coniston Water, in York, and back in London. Diana was born in London, the daughter of Marjorie (née Jackson) and Richard Aneurin Jones, both of whom were teachers.

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