Daisy Ashford

Daisy Ashford, full name Margaret Mary Julia Ashford (later Devlin) (7 April 1881 - 15 January 1972) was an English writer who is most famous for writing The Young Visiters, or, Mister Salteena's Plan, a novella concerning the upper class society of late 19th century England, when she was just nine years old. The novella was published 29 years later in 1919, preserving her juvenile spelling and punctuation. (She wrote the title as "Viseters" in her manuscript, but it was published as "Visiters".) The book had a foreword by J. M. Barrie and remains in print in the United Kingdom to this day. The first chapter begins: "Mr Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him."

Life
Daisy Ashford was born in Petersham, Surrey, the daughter of Emma and William Ashford, and was largely educated at home. At the age of 4 she dictated her first story, The Life of Father McSwiney, to her father; it was published in 1983. As well as The Young Visiters, as a child she wrote several other stories, a play titled A Woman's Crime, and The Hangman's Daughter, a short novel which she considered to be her best work.

She stopped writing during her teens. In 1904 she moved with her family to Bexhill, and then to London where she worked as a secretary. She also ran a canteen in Dover during the First World War. When published in 1919, The Young Visiters was an immediate success, and several of her other stories were published in 1920. In the same year, she married James Devlin and settled in Norfolk, at one time running the King's Arms Hotel in Reepham. She did not write in later years, although in old age she did begin an autobiography which she later destroyed. She died in 1972.

Ashford's name was sometimes used as a way to criticize adult authors of the 1920s if their style was deemed too childish or naïve; Edmund Wilson referred to the novel This Side of Paradise by his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald as "a classic in a class with The Young Visiters."

Roman à clef Daisy Goes to the Moon by Matt K. stars Daisy Ashford, is written in Ashford's distinctive style, and is the first of a series of "Daisy Ashford Adventures" to be published.

The Young Visiters
Ashford wrote The Young Visiters at the age of nine, in a red-covered exercise book. Full of spelling mistakes, each chapter was also written as a single paragraph. Many years later, in 1917 and aged 36, Ashford rediscovered her manuscript languishing in a drawer, and lent it to Margaret Mackenzie, a friend who was recovering from influenza. It passed through several other hands, before arriving with Frank Swinnerton, a novelist who was also a reader for the publishing house of Chatto and Windus. Largely due to Swinnerton's enthusiasm for this piece of juvenilia, the book was published almost exactly as it had been written. J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, agreed to write a preface, and the book became a huge success. The book was so successful that it was reprinted 18 times in its first year alone. After its publication, untrue rumours soon started that the book was in fact an elaborate literary hoax, and that it had been written by Barrie himself, who had – in rather transparent jest – attributed earlier writings of his to children he knew. These rumours persisted for years.

A stage play of The Young Visiters, adapted by Mrs George Norman and Margaret Mackenzie was first performed in London in 1920, transferring shortly thereafter to New York. The New York production, at the Thirty-ninth Street Theatre, received generally good reviews: one reviewer stated "'The Young Visiters' ... has been turned into a play by the simple use of a pair of shears and a pot of paste. Probably no novel was ever so reverently dramatized since the world began."

A musical based on the book, by Michael Ashton and Ian Kellam, was produced in 1968, and a television film version of The Young Visiters was made by the BBC in 2003, starring Jim Broadbent as Alfred Salteena, Lyndsey Marshal as Ethel Monticue and Hugh Laurie as Lord Bernard Clark. The screenplay was written by Patrick Barlow.

The original manuscript of The Young Visiters is held in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.

Published writings

 * The Young Visiters, or, Mr Salteena's Plan London: Chatto and Windus,  1919
 * Daisy Ashford: Her Book: A Collection of the Remaining Novels London: George H. Doran and Company, 1920
 * Love and Marriage: Three Stories London: Hart-Davis, 1965
 * Where Love Lies Deepest London: Hart-Davis, 1966
 * The Hangman's Daughter and Other Stories Oxford University Press, 1983 (Includes The Life of Father McSwiney)