Reading through Storr’s collected works while preparing the exhibition, the extent to which her writing employs supernatural and fantasy elements to draw decidedly ordinary characters into unsettling-sometimes very frightening-situations was striking. The VR component comprises digitised items from the archives augmented by memories shared and personal objects loaned by members of her family. The way into what eventually became “The Catherine Storr Experience” is a three-minute interactive virtual reality tour (see ). The opportunity finally came when I was leading a project to develop an online “exhibition” that makes some of the material in the Seven Stories collection freely available over the internet.

Footnote 1 This unusual profile made me curious to see what the archives contained. I have often taught Marianne Dreams ( 1958) and enjoyed reading her Clever Polly stories with children, but I knew she had written a great deal more that she was unusual in her day for being a mother, writer and medical professional that she was for a time married to Anthony Storr, the well-known psychiatrist, journalist, and broadcaster, and that she contributed to key publications about children’s literature during the 1970s, including that excellent volume, The Cool Web: The Pattern of Children’s Reading ( 1977). I had been wanting to explore the Catherine Storr archives from the time they first began to be deposited by Storr’s daughters in 2008. I began by thinking about the writer and her work, but found myself travelling back to the 1960s and 1970s and engaging with some of the gatherings, voices, debates and initiatives that helped establish children’s literature studies as an academic discipline in Britain, not the least of these being the launch of this very journal. This effect is particularly strong when the materials relate to individuals and events known to the researcher, as I discovered when working with the Catherine Storr archive at Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children’s Books in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the north of England. Archives are time machines: reading correspondence, looking through manuscript drafts, photographs, receipts and all the other items an archive may contain conjures up people and moments from the past.

Marianne dreams by catherine storr