Theresa Whistler

Theresa Furse, writer: born London 23 April 1927; married 1950 Laurence Whistler (died 2000; one son, one daughter, one stepdaughter, and one stepson deceased; marriage dissolved 1986); died Dolton, Devon 20 July 2007.

Theresa Whistler, the children's author and biographer of Walter de la Mare, had the gift of enthralling young people with her delight in the mystery and loveliness of daily life, especially in the country. Visitors to Little Place, the house on the outskirts of Lyme Regis in Dorset that she shared with her husband, the glass engraver and poet Laurence Whistler, and their family, entered a magical atmosphere.

She was born Theresa Furse, the daughter of the eminent civil servant Sir Ralph Furse and granddaughter of Sir Henry Newbolt, poet and man of letters. Although the heyday of Newbolt's home, as a fount of literary patronage, criticism and creative writing, was before her time, all her life she appreciated having roots in so gifted a circle. Two of its members, both poets, influenced her deeply - Mary Coleridge, whom she only knew through her haunting verses, and Walter de la Mare, who became a close friend.

Awarded a congratulatory first class degree in English Literature in 1948, Theresa was among Lord David Cecil's most talented Oxford pupils of that decade, alongside such stars as Rachel Trickett and John Bayley. Her charming, elfin face matched her intense, delicate response to life. She was offered a lectureship by Bristol University, but turned it down, because she was becoming increasingly responsible for bringing up the children of her elder sister, Jill, who had died in 1944. In 1950 she married Laurence Whistler, Jill's bereaved husband.

Theresa Whistler's first publication was The Collected Poems of Mary Coleridge (1954), followed in 1955 by a children's book of extraordinary beauty, The River Boy; in the de la Mare tradition, it conveys, through a succession of enchanted, dreamlike episodes, a child's heartfelt aliveness, on the brink of adolescence, to wild nature and the seasons. This was quite as much an expression of Whistler's own excitement: "I love weather, don't you, just in itself? & the constant new experiences such extremes bring?" she would tell friends, describing from her later home, Woolridge Farm, in Devon, her thrill at the onset of a freezing winter:

Effects of light, or balance, some behaviour of physical objects one has never seen before. . . Now there's a chaffinch actually trying out his treble - (lovely the way he thinks he's just composing it this very minute, & it's never been heard before) - against the sleet. How can he?

In the late 1950s, she embarked on the magisterial work which eventually appeared as Imagination of the Heart: the life of Walter de la Mare (1993). Because of her domestic duties, writer's block and constant revision of an unmanageably large manuscript, this took nearly 35 years. But, aided by her high academic standards and power to evoke a period and place, the result was a compelling book in which she explored with sensitivity and humour not only the workings of her subject's marvellous imagination, but also the minds of other leading players, such as Newbolt and Edward Thomas, and brought to life the Edwardian literary world and that of the Georgian poets.

Her special strength lay in an exceptional affinity with her subject; and some would say that she drew closest to de la Mare's vision not so much through scholarly study of his career as in the rapt observation of nature: in 1956, just after his death, she wrote: "It's damp enough tonight, with all the dry hay-smells round the house gone grassy again & dozens of moths are enjoying the light of my lamp, in their lovely, motionless, attentive way - all sitting round the shade - with only a long trembling of delight now and then . . . Just the kind of scene and hour one could share in description with him - and will always be aching in vain to share, from now on."

Despite unique family ties and similarity of outlook, her marriage to Laurence Whistler broke down, after 30 years. Theresa wrote of "the indestructible good we had, malgré tout." Although they were not re-united, their tenderness for each other remained profoundly important to them both.

In 1982, Theresa Whistler became involved once again in composing a children's story, this time the collective creation of a group of 15 children under her tuition at Brixworth Primary School, Northampton. Suggested as a project by the headmaster Peter Woods, an admirer of The River Boy, and published as Rushavenn Time, it bore her unmistakeable stamp. It won the prestigious Nestlé Smarties Prize for children's books in 1988.

As a poet, Whistler showed a developing talent, but being diffident about her work, published little. In her ardent, keenly observant verses she focused, crucially, on the drama of seasonal changes and the wild creatures she knew so well and loved from infancy. This natural life, alongside devotion to her children and others dearest to her, lay at the heart of her being.

Hugh Cecil