Magdalen King-Hall

Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton

A Sudan Scrapbook

Somehow Overdone

Originally published in 1958, this reconstruction of the lives of young children of nursery age is an excursion into the past, from the Middle Ages to the opening years of the twentieth century. It tells of the methods, often extraordinary to our ideas, by which they were brought up from babyhood to about seven years old, their clothes, diet, the fearsome remedies that were inflicted on them in illness, their toys, games, books and first steps in education. It shows how the pristine simplicity of the child’s nature, which hardly alters throughout the centuries, was moulded by the pressure of the adult society around them into some semblance of the accepted contemporary type. This story of the nursery is not only about young children, but about their parents too. There are parents in it who are stern, harsh, even cruel, and many more loving and careful ones; but one thing strikes us in these parents of former times: there is an air of unassailable confidence and certainty about them that the modern parent, versed in child psychology, would find it hard to achieve. As one seventeenth-century worthy put it, ‘For that which always happens in a concerne so universall as breeding children must needs be provided for by a traditionell method of proceeding.’

The Story of the Nursery

The Wicked Lady Skelton

The Wicked Lady

Rowland Hughes

First published in 1944, Magdalen King-Hall's Life and Death of the Wicked Lady Skelton is a historical novel set in late-seventeenth-century England. It tells the story of Barbara Skelton, a well-born young woman trapped in a loveless marriage, who finds escape from the tedium of her life by leading a double life as a highway robber. Rich in historical detail and high on melodrama, the novel follows Barbara's infamous career of robbery, adultery and murder, without painting her entirely as a monster. Indeed, the novel's status as a bestseller owes much to King-Hall's sympathetic depiction of the frustrations of domestic life for an ambitious, intelligent woman with no means of self-expression.

Bryony Lavery

Lady Barbara Skelton is beautiful, wild and truly wicked. Forced into a respectable marriage with a man she can't love, she soon becomes bored and embarks on a secret life of gambling, highway robbery and murder. But she's playing a dangerous game. Shadowed by betrayal, threatened by revenge, can Barbara escape her wicked life? Or will she be abandoned to a terrible fate? Gainsborough Studios made Magdalen King-Hall's historical novel into an unusually racy costume drama starring Margaret Lockwood and James Mason, The Wicked Lady, which became the top-grossing British movie of 1946. This stage adaptation incorporates aerial sequences created with the help of specialist company, Upswing.

Magdalen King-Hall

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