Books: A Small but Costly Crown

THE YOUNG VISITERS (92 pp.)—Daisy Ashford—Doubleday ($1.75).

Buxom, carefree, serene—to all appearances Daisy Ashford was just like hundreds of other well-bred little English girls growing up at the beginning of the century. After studying a photograph of Daisy at the age of nine, Sir James Barrie remarked on her "air of careless power ... a complacency . . . that by the severe might perhaps be called smugness." Perhaps Barrie was right, for what distinguished Daisy Ashford from her fellow moppets was the fact that she was the most readable child novelist in English literature.

Daisy wrote her novels in twopenny notebooks. She...