It would be wrong to paint a gloomy picture of the current state of children's publishing, however. In every aspect of the juvenile publishing industry – from picture books through fantasy, history, myth, realist novels, adventure, mystery, horror, romance, and so on and so on, innovative, stimulating, and impressive books for readers of all ages and abilities are being produced. The first part of this book ended by looking at the consequences of publishing decisions made at the end of the nineteenth century and which have continued to influence contemporary publishing specifically with regard to gender. It seems appropriate, then, to end this section by looking at the work of two women writers at the end of the twentieth century who have gone a long way towards ridding us of these residual influences: Diana Wynne Jones and Anne Fine.

Diana Wynne Jones is a highly skilled and innovative writer of fantasy. All of her books explore the relationship between fantasy and reality in a particularly pointed way. Fantasy usually involves the creation of an alternative world which is temporarily entered by protagonists (and readers). Diana Wynne Jones certainly creates alternative worlds, but while in most fantasy there is a link or correspondence between what happens in the fantasy world and what happens in the ‘real’ world of the text (for instance, the child who conquers his/her problems in the fantasy world usually finds that previously troubling situations in the real world have diminished or been resolved), in Jones's stories the relationship between these worlds is rather different. Her books generally assume that what seems to be a fantasy to her readers is reality elsewhere, and that the tendency for most people to relegate what seems to be improbable to the realms of fantasy is a learned response. This gives her an interest in both history and ideology which she works out to great (often comic) effect. For instance, she looks at the paradox that in twentieth-century Britain it was usual to train children to be rationalists while feeding them on a diet of stories which consisted largely of antirationalist material (fairy tales, stories about witches, talking animals, magic powers – all kinds of ‘fantasies’).