ACHUKA Book of the Day 21 Jul 2026
PUBLISHED FIFTY YEARS AGO
Marigold Green calls herself ‘hideous, quaint and barmy’. Other people call her Bilgewater, a corruption of Bill’s daughter. Growing up motherless in a boys’ school where her father is housemaster, she is convinced of her own plainness and peculiarity.
Groomed by the wise and loving Paula, upstaged by bad, beautiful Grace and ripe for seduction by entirely the wrong sort of boy, she suffers extravagantly and comically in her pilgrimage through the turbulent, twilight world of alarming adolescence.
“Of Bilgewater Gardam says, ‘it is the choice that has to be made between the creative and the critical or academic life’. It is also her most seriously funny book. The cramping social worlds of these clever girls have almost disappeared, but their creator’s skill encourages rereading and different interpretations of the details, hence the appearance of new editions on adult lists.”
Cambridge Guide to Children’s Books in English
[Together with the two preceding novels, Bilgewater] “established Jane Gardam as a late-arriving, but leading writer of what might be called the ‘second golden age’ of English children’s literature. Her books attracted considerable admiration—Auberon Waugh called her ‘head and shoulders above the normal run—and the only aspect of her work to attract adverse criticism has been the elitism of her frequent literary references, though tit has to be accepted these are integral to her plots.”
Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature
“Marigold Green is obsessed by her plump ugliness and tries to make an equation of James Joyce and Thomas Hardy. As a result there is a mild self-indulgent elitism about the writing, and the adult critic may be looking back with all too much sympathy to this kind of adolescence. But the wit of expression and the humour of situation save the book[s] from any suggestion of post-Freudian intensity. The younger reader grows in literary awareness by virtue of a bond with an author who shows rather than tells.”
Margaret Meek in Twentieth Century Children’s Writers
I just read and greatly enjoyed Bilgewater by Jane Gardam lent to me by @christine_evan5. Wonderful characters, funny, strangely surreal and sad. I love this cover too, that takes me straight to the story's heart. Fascinating to read a 1976 'YA'. Must read more of hers.#amreading pic.twitter.com/ryLH6Or5J9
— Amarantha Charlotte Pike (@amarantha_pike) June 9, 2021
Today finished a lovely reread of Bilgewater by Jane Gardam. If you haven't read it, do. I read it over and over again as a teenager and it's just as pitch-perfect as I remember.
— Liz Cross (@LizJCross) December 29, 2017
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