Jill Murphy. The Worst Witch (first published by Allison & Bushby in 1974)
Jill Murphy’s earliest memories were of drawing and stories. She has always loved telling and illustrating stories. She began writing The Worst Witch at the age of 15 and was inspired by her own school experiences. She modeled her characters on her own teachers, friends and enemies (!). In an interview, she said that „My two friends and I used to come home in our dark uniforms, looking very scruffy at the end of the day. My Mum used to say ‘Look at you all. You look like the three witches!’ „. She finished the book when she was 18, but after numerous rejections, it was first published in 1974 when she was 24.
Future witches study at Miss Cackle’s Academy for Witches. Outside, gloomy gray walls and towers rise to the sky, and inside there are long narrow corridors running between the staircases and the sunlight almost never gets in. The girls who study here also wear black uniforms, capes and peaked caps. Mildred Hubble is the clumsiest among them. What she is doing usually goes wrong. If she accidentally succeeds with a spell, she will cause trouble with that as well. In the novel, we can follow her adventures with her best friend Maud Spellbody and the snooty know-it-all Ethel Hallow within the enchanted walls of the school.
Between 1974 and 2018, eight volumes of the series were published, each covering a school semester. The book series has also been adapted into several movies and TV series. The fifth volume will be published in Hungarian this year. I recommend the book to anyone who has ever felt like they’re doing everything wrong and that no one notices when something goes well, but when it doesn’t, there’s always a witness to it.
