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Eva Ibbotson
| Full Name: |
Maria
Charlotte Michelle Wiesner
Ibbotson |
| Born: |
January 21, 1925
Vienna, Austria |
| Died: |
October 20, 2010
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, England |
| Occupation: |
Writer |
| Nationality: |
British |
| Links: |
|
Biography
Wiesner was born in Vienna in 1925 to non-practising Jewish parents. Her father, Bertold Paul Wiesner, was a physician who pioneered human infertility treatment. 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 Wilhelmine Gmeyner, was a successful novelist and playwright, who had worked with Bertolt Brecht and written film scripts for Georg Pabst.
Wiesner's parents separated in 1928 when she was three years old. What followed for Eva was, in her words, 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, while her mother left Vienna for Paris in 1933 after her work was banned by Hitler, putting a sudden end to her successful writing career.
In 1934, her mother moved to England, settling in Belsize Park, north London, and sent for her daughter. Other family members also escaped from Vienna and joined Anna and Eva Maria in England, 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.
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. During her postgraduate studies at Cambridge University, she met her future husband, Alan Ibbotson, an ecologist.
Eva married Alan Ibbotson in 1947. They moved to Newcastle-upon-Tyne where they raised their family of three sons and a daughter.
Finding the thought of having to make a career out of conducting experiments on animals appalling, she decided to discontinue her pursuit of a career in scientific research. Ibbotson returned to college, graduating with a diploma in education in 1965 from the University of Durham. She briefly became a teacher in the 1960s before embarking on her writing career.
Ibbotson's husband died in 1998, making her "too sad to write in her usual humorous style", and she then wrote her ecological classic Journey to the River Sea. She died at her home in Newcastle on 20 October 2010, having just completed editing the proofs of her last children's book, One Dog and his Boy, and starting work on another ghost story to add to her long and successful series of children's ghost stories.
Works in the WWEnd Database
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