The Complete Polly and the Wolf

When Catherine Storr’s daughter was very small, she was afraid of the wolf under her bed, so every night her mother would tell her a story in which Polly outwitted the wolf. These bedtime stories eventually became the collection Clever Polly and the Stupid Wolf, a wonderfully thrilling and reassuring series of adventures in which the clever, independent, and unstoppable Polly fools the persistent, hungry young wolf time and again. In a match much like Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner but more polite and quick-witted, Polly and the wolf develop ever-more complicated ways of turning the tables on each other as they grow older and, in Polly’s case at least, wiser. Three more collections of stories followed the original Clever Polly, all hilariously inventive variations on a much loved theme, and all of the stories are collected here for the first time.

Catherine Storr (1913–2001) was born Catherine Cole and brought up in Kensington, London. A talented organist, she studied with Gustav Holst at St Paul’s Girls’ School. She graduated from Newnham College, Cambridge, with a degree in English literature and went on to study medicine. She began practicing as a psychiatrist in 1944 and worked at Middlesex Hospital in the 1950s and ’60s before becoming an editor at Penguin in 1966. She published her first book, Ingeborg and Ruthy, in 1940, and married Anthony Storr, a fellow psychiatrist, in 1942. They had three daughters: Sophia, Emma, and Polly—for whom she wrote Polly and the Wolf and its sequels. In addition to her stories about Polly and the Wolf, she went on to write some one hundred books for young readers and adults, including Marianne Dreams, Marianne and Mark, Lucy, and Tales from a Psychiatrist’s Couch. About her work, she once remarked, “I don’t write with a child readership in mind, I write for the childish side of myself.” 

Marjorie Ann Watts is the daughter of Punch cartoonist Arthur Watts. After training as a painter and illustrator in the 1940s, she worked for a time as an art editor and typographer before embarking on a career writing and illustrating books for children. In addition to her stories for young people, she has also published a novel, a story collection, a memoir of her childhood in wartime London, and a children’s guide to European painting.