Program Description
Event Details
Program Presenter: Laura Ellen Wade is a native of Strasburg, Va., whose interest in Tasha Tudor began in the early 1970s. As a retired elementary school librarian, she seriously began collecting Tudor’s books, original art, prints and other ephemera in 2014. She and her husband visited and toured her home in Vermont in 2015 and in 2019. She has given talks on Tudor at the June 2018 Children’s Literature Conference at Shenandoah University, at the New Market Library, at Samuel’s Public Library in Front Royal as well as having a display of Tudor’s books and prints at the Shenandoah County Public Library in Edinburg and at the Strasburg Community Library for the 80th anniversary of Tudor’s first book, Pumpkin Moonshine. Laura Ellen is a member of the Pennsylvania Tasha Tudor Society Chapter where she presented a program titled, “Playthings of Tasha Tudor and Her Family: The Creative Imagination Expressed Through Dolls and Toys” last August in Lititz.
Program Information: Tasha Tudor, A New England Legend: Living a Lifestyle Through Her Books
In her books, Tasha Tudor portrays the lifestyle of a New Englander in the 1830s. Using her own four children as models, dressing them in Kate Greenaway-style clothes, Tudor charms the readers with her quaint and romanticized life of that period. Cooking over an open hearth in a tin oven, wearing clothes fashioned in the 1830s style and refusing to succumb to having a television in her home, you will see that Tudor lived the life she wrote about and illustrated in her books.
She received the Caldecott Honor Award for two books, Mother Goose and 1 is One. She also received the Regina Medal given by the Catholic Library Association for her contributions to children’s literature. Her work has been displayed at the Norman Rockwell Museum and the Abby Aldrich Museum in Colonial Williamsburg. The largest collection of Tudor’s work is now at the University of Southern Mississippi’s deGrummond Children’s Library in Hattiesburg.