Edward McMaken Eager (June 20, 1911 – October 23, 1964) was an American lyricist, dramatist, and writer of children's fiction. His children's novels followed Edith Nesbit in featuring the appearance of magic in the lives of ordinary children. Most of the Magic series is contemporary low fantasy.
Eager was born in and grew up in Toledo, Ohio and attended Harvard University class of 1935.[1] After graduation, he moved to New York City where he lived for 14 years before moving to Connecticut.[2] He married Jane Eberly in 1938[3] and they had a son Fritz.[4] Eager was a childhood fan of L. Frank Baum's Oz series, and started writing children's books when he could not find stories he wanted to read to his own young son. In his books, Eager often acknowledges his debt to E. Nesbit, whom he thought of as the best children's author of all time.[5] A well-known lyricist and playwright, Eager died on October 23, 1964 in Stamford Connecticut[6] at the age of fifty-three.
Mouse Manor is told from the viewpoint of Miss Myrtilla the mouse, sole occupant of the manor which she has inherited from her mother. She keeps house faithfully, dusting the family portraits and baking a bag pudding for her solitary Christmas dinner.[19]
Omnibus edition: Edward Eager's Tales of Magic (2000)
A dull summer is improved when Katharine, Mark, Jane and Martha find a magical coin-like talisman. The catch is that it grants half of any wish made by its bearer—a wish to be on a desert island sends them to the Sahara desert, and their mother ends up halfway home when she wishes to return home during a dull visit to her relatives. That "half magic" is a challenge, sometimes comical, until the children learn to double their wishes.
Half Magic was a number one seller in America. Anthony Boucher, comparing the novel to Nesbit, described it as "gay and charming, yet rigidly governed fantasy in the Unknown manner."[20]
Here are the further adventures of Martha, Jane, Mark, and Katharine from Half-Magic. Their summer vacation is enlivened by an entire magic lake, channelled through a talking, and somewhat grumpy, box turtle. They are stranded on a desert island, visit Ali-Baba's cave, and end up rescued by some children we will see in the next book.
Half Magic and Magic by the Lake take place in the 1920s, earlier than Eager's other novels.
Martha's children, Roger and Ann, and their Aunt Katharine's children, Eliza and Jack, find that the combination of a toy castle, Scott's Ivanhoe, and a little magic can build another wonderful series of adventures. A running theme in Eager's novels is his many references to the novels of E. Nesbit; Knight's Castle pays explicit tribute to Nesbit's The Magic City, and also makes an explicit reference to the cartoons of Charles Addams. (Half Magic includes a reference to a short story by Saki.) Knight's Castle won Ohioana Book Award for Juvenile Literature in 1957.[21]
Eliza, Jack, Roger, and Ann find an herb garden where thyme grows, which lets them travel through time (until the thyme is ripe). On one adventure they rescue their Aunt Jane, Uncle Mark and their mothers from an adventure they took as children. This gives an alternate view of one of the adventures in Magic by the Lake.
Laura, James, and their wonderful new neighbors, Kip and Lydia, wish up some summer adventures when the well in their new yard is more than they imagined.
Although all of Eager's other novels for children depict what are clearly adventures in supernatural magic, Magic or Not and its sequel The Well-Wishers are different in tone from his other books, because all of the "magical" events in these two novels are described ambiguously, with clues to permit possible non-supernatural explanations.
The children return to the magic well from Magic or Not for another unpredictable series of adventures which might (or might not) be genuine magic.
Barnaby, John, Susan, Abbie and Fredericka check out a tattered book from the library for seven days. Oddly, it carefully and correctly records every word they say. Soon they find that it not only records events, but creates new magical adventures.
Among the Magic novels only Seven-Day Magic features children who do not appear in at least one other book. It does refer to Half Magic by name, and has a chapter where the children visit the very end of Half Magic and what might have happened afterwards.
Among their adventures, they visit the time when Laura Ingalls Wilder was alive and John's grandmother was a school-teacher; the era, the children speculate, might have been that of On the Banks of Plum Creek. On the other hand, as the adventure wraps up with a blizzard, Edward Eager might have been dramatizing the beginning of the 1888 Schoolhouse Blizzard; the adventure is too brief and the text too unclear to be certain.
It was his last book.
