Author: Barbara Euphan Todd

Barbara Euphan Todd created for creating Worzel Gummidge, the talking scarecrow who became the centre of a long sequence of children’s books. Miss Ranskill Comes Home, published in 1946 under her married name Barbara Bower, was her only novel for mature readers. It follows Nona Ranskill, who returns to wartime England after years stranded on a desert island and discovers that ordinary life has become governed by rationing, identity papers, unfamiliar abbreviations, and social suspicion. The novel uses her outsider’s perspective to combine comedy, grief, and criticism of wartime habits. Todd had worked as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse during the First World War and wrote for magazines including Punch and the Spectator before publishing children’s fiction. Some of her books were collaborations with her husband, Commander John Bower. Persephone Books later reissued Miss Ranskill Comes Home, restoring attention to its distinctive treatment of survival and homecoming. Its success in Britain and America revealed a different register from Todd’s imaginative rural stories for younger readers.