Jean Slaughter Doty

Jean Slaughter Doty is an excellent writer, and is well worth seeking out. Her best known book in the UK is Can I Get There By Candlelight?, a time-slip story about a girl who moves next door to a derelict estate. When she and her pony go through the gate between her house and the estate, she is transported to the estate in its glory, a hundred years ago. The book was printed as a paperback by Scholastic and is reasonably easy to find.

None of her other books were published in the UK, but they are very well worth finding, and some of them are reasonably priced, even when you factor in shipping from the USA. I haven’t read all of the books, by a long way, but I am particularly fond of the twosome: Summer Pony and Winter Pony. These are about Ginny and her pony Mokey and are both lovely reads. American books held on to the idea of illustrating books longer than the UK, and these are beautifully illustrated by Ted Lewin (Winter Pony), and Sam Saviit (Summer Pony). Summer Pony and Winter Pony have now been reprinted, so are available from Amazon.

The Monday Horse is the hardest to find of her books. Both it and The Crumb (which is the easiest to find) are about abuses in the showing world. They’re aimed at an older audience than the Mokey books, and are a darker read. Yesterday’s Horses is also something of a dark read. A girl finds an abandoned foal, but this pales into insignificance at first as a fatal virus ravages the local horse community.

Under her maiden name, Jean Slaughter, Jean wrote several pony care and riding instruction books.

She is married to the cartoonist Roy Doty, and according to the (possibly rather out of date now) flap of my copy of Winter Pony, lives in Connecticut with her husband, children and numerous horses, dogs and Siames cats. She has hunted in England and Ireland, and breeds ponies. She has been a show judge at numerous shows, including the National Horse Show at Madison Square Garden.

Links

For such a well-regarded author, there is remarkably little on the net about her. If you need to read any reviews to encourage you to seek out her books, try www.ponydom.com, where there are sections on most of her books.

Thanks: to Susan Bourgeau and Dawn Harrison for all their help with the photographs.