| Ruby Constance Annie Ashby Ferguson | |
| Birth Name: | Ruby Constance Annie Ashby |
| Birth Date: | 28 July 1899 |
| Birth Place: | Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, England |
| Nationality: | British |
| Other Names: | R. C. Ashby, Ruby Ferguson |
| Occupation: | Novelist |
| Notable Works: | Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary |
| Spouse: | Samuel Ferguson |
Ruby Constance Annie Ferguson, née Ashby (28 July 1899[1] – 11 November 1966), was an English writer of popular fiction, including children's literature, romances and mysteries as R. C. Ashby and Ruby Ferguson. She is best known today for her novel Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary and her Jill books, a series of Pullein-Thompsonesque pony books for children and young adults.
Ruby Constance Annie Ashby was born in Hebden Bridge and raised in Reeth, North Yorkshire. Her parents were Ann Elizabeth, (born Spencer) and the Reverend David Ashby, a Wesleyan minister. Ferguson later became a lay officer of the Methodist church. She received her education at Bradford Girls Grammar School and then at St Hilda's College at the University of Oxford, where she read English from 1919 to 1922, gaining a 3rd class BA and, a few years later, the Oxford MA.
She then moved to Manchester and took a job as a secretary, supplementing her income by writing a regular column for the British Weekly. She reviewed books for the publisher Hodder and Stoughton. Her writing career began in earnest when she submitted some detective stories for a weekly competition in the Manchester Evening News. Her first full-length novel, The Moorland Man, appeared in 1926 published by Hodder and Stoughton. She continued writing novels and stories under the name "R.C. Ashby" until the mid-1930s.
In 1929 she assisted the Liberal party candidate William C. Mallison at the West Derbyshire constituency.
On 1 March 1934, she married Samuel Ferguson, a widower and electrical engineer with two sons at the Water Lane Methodist Church, in Wilmslow. Three years later, she published Lady Rose and Mrs. Memmary as Ruby Ferguson, a romantic novel that became her greatest success, which was republished in 2004 by Persephone Books.[2] After its original publication, The Queen Mother is reported to have enjoyed the book so much that she invited Ruby Ferguson to dinner at Buckingham Palace. The new edition also received favourable notices and it was one of the "Books of the Year" by The Spectator.
Between 1949 and 1962 she gained great popularity with the "Jill" books for her step-grandchildren, Libs, Sallie, and Pip. Her last book in 1967, Children at the Shop, is a fictionalised memoir of her childhood.[3]
Aside from the Jill series, most of Ferguson's books are long out of print.
The Jill books are a series of nine children's novels about young equestrienne Jill Crewe and her adventures with her two ponies, Black Boy and Rapide. In recent editions, small changes were made to make the books more accessible. The series takes the protagonist from the age of twelve to fifteen, from a pony novice to a prize-winning rider.[4]
In the first book in the series, Jill's Gymkhana, Jill's father has recently died, and she moves with her mother to a small Pool Cottage near the fictional village of Chatton. Her mother hopes to support them both as a children's author (similarly to E. Nesbit's classic The Railway Children). Jill is at first a social outcast in "horsy" Chatton because she doesn't own a pony and can't ride. When her mother's stories finally begin to sell for £52, however, the first thing she buys is "Black Boy" pony for £12 for her daughter. With hard work and the expert assistance of Martin Lowe, a wheelchair-using former Royal Air Force pilot, Jill becomes a star of Chatton equitation.
Jill is grateful for her mother's success; however, as she says repeatedly throughout the series, she "can't get on" with her mother's books at all, finding them impossibly sweet and whimsical (possibly a veiled criticism of the works of Enid Blyton). In contrast, Ferguson's Jill is an active, independent and witty character who defies post-war expectations for English girls by scorning ladylike pursuits, treating boys her own age as equals, and working hard to achieve her goals. This makes Ferguson's writing outstanding not only in the pony stories genre, but in children's literature generally.[5]
Mrs. Darcy, a local riding instructor, has had to go to London, and Jill along with some of her friends, is looking after the riding school in Mrs. Darcy's absence. These responsibilities extend to looking after Blue Smoke, Mrs. Darcy's own gorgeous hunter worth 500 guineas. However, Blue Smoke gets desperately ill in the middle of the night, and Jill is called up to the riding school to help get the vet, along with Wendy. Source: Jill Has Two Ponies, Chapter 11