Pat was an Anglophile. She loved everything that came out of Britain. Not so much Ireland, except for their writers.
Throughout our childhood, we were inundated with books written by British writers, such as Winnie-the-Pooh, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Railway Children, and The Swallows and Amazons series. (I read them over and over again.) If you looked at our bookshelves during our childhood, they were all British authors, except for the Anne of Green Gables series.
As an adult, I have always wondered why she gave us these series rather than children's books by American writers*. I made up a complicated explanation: it had to do with her disparaging anything American. Recently, I finally figured it out. The British series were children's books from her childhood. That's all.
Like many parents, she wanted to share her childhood with us.
(* I only discovered the Little Life on the Prairie series when my dear friend, Karen, told me about them when I was an adult.)
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