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Gangbare naam: Adshead, Gladys L.
Officiële naam: Adshead, Gladys Lucy
Geboortedatum: 1896-04-25
Overlijdensdatum: 1985
Geslacht: female
Geboorteplaats: Manchester, England, UK
Plaats van overlijden: Santa Rosa, California, USA
Woonplaatsen: Manchester, England, UK
Maryland, USA
Illinois, USA
Santa Rosa, California, USA
Opleiding: Froebel Educational Institute
Beroepen: Teacher
Children's Author
Korte biografie: Gladys Lucy Adshead (1896–1985) was a British-born writer of children's books.

Adshead was born in Manchester, England, to James Frederick and Bertha Wilson Groome Adshead. She was educated at Froebel Educational Institute, a teacher training college. She became a teacher and headmistress in private schools in England, where she was a member of the Royal Society of Teachers, and later in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Illinois in the United States.

Gladys Adshead was best known for her "Brownie" books, the first of which was published in 1938 by Oxford University Press and entitled Brownies - Hush!. She died in Santa Rosa, California in 1985.

(source: Wikipedia)

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Brownies- It's Christmas! door Gladys L. Adshead

We discussed the Brownies in my Comics and Graphic Novels class, so naturally when I had the chance to read them, I jumped on it. I have the 1955 copyright version. I enjoyed the simple illustrations and the way that the illustrator used the colors, mostly green with red that popped in to bring attention to certain things. I also enjoyed how the size of the words changed to reflect their meaning. For example, the word "crept" was written smaller than the regular sized text. The word "long" became "l----ong." The story itself was cute and well written, with moments of suspense (would the Brownies be thrown into the fire!?) and moments of kindness. A great children's book.… (meer)

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recipe_addict | Sep 21, 2014 |

What Miranda Knew door Gladys L. Adshead

I do not recall the process of learning to read, although my mother tells me that it began some time before first grade, as I began to pick up more and more from our nightly story-hour. I DO recall, however, that this little picture book by Gladys L. Adshead was one of the delights of my early childhood, a regular feature at bedtime, and one of the first books I read on my own. I would pore over it for hours, reading and rereading the simple story, and gazing at the soft, pastel illustrations.

This tale of an old man and an old woman, who lived quietly together in a little white house with a twisted chimney, a beautiful garden full of flowers, and (most importantly) a lazy, purring cat named Miranda, has always had the power to enthrall me, despite its rampant sentimentality. Something about the gentle cadence and matter-of-fact tone of Adshead's story made the appearance of a band of angels and two little babies seem like a perfectly natural development. The little old man and little old lady were lonely, after all, with their own children all grown up and far away... It made perfect sense that some angels would descend with little "Jennifer -an- John" to keep them company. And of course, it also made perfect sense that whatever happened, Miranda always knew...

My copy of What Miranda Knew is rather battered, having survived my tumultuous childhood, and it is all the more precious to me for having been my mother's before me, with the inscription at the front indicating it was a Christmas gift in 1944. Although I was not aware of this as a child, the illustrator, Elizabeth Orton Jones, won the Caldecott Medal in 1945 for her work on Rachel Field's Prayer for a Child. Given the charm of this book, I am not at all surprised.… (meer)