Margery Gill: a life in pictures

'Every drawing is a fight which I really enjoy,' Gill once said. She did most of her work in pen and ink on fine French paper on top of a homemade light box. She continually revised her work by scratching out lines with a scalpel Photograph: Paddy Jordan/toucansurf

Margery Gill studied etching and engraving at the Royal College of Art before teaching drawing at Maidstone College of Art, with a young fellow teacher, David Hockney Photograph: Unknown/toucansurf.com

The Guardian and other papers frequently praised Gill’s work in the 1960s and 70s. The paper described as “lovely” her drawings for Andrew Lang’s Fifty Favourite Fairy Tales, which included this one Photograph: Nonesuch/toucansurf.com

An illustration by Margery Gill from The Tale of the Turnip by Anita Hewett, published in 1961 Photograph: Bodley Head/toucansurf.com

Gill’s realistic style suited the era of kitchen sink dramas. Her lively, but sometimes poignant drawings of children underlined a new attitude to the young. Children were no longer to be talked down to, but taken seriously Photograph: Puffin Books/toucansurf.com

Shirley Hughes, Gill’s more celebrated contemporary, was among her admirers. She said: 'I thought her work was terrific. It made me look to my laurels' Photograph: Puffin Books/toucansurf.com

Gill particularly enjoyed illustrating a 1972 edition of Dawn of Fear, Susan Cooper's story of a child's experience of the war, because it chimed with own wartime memories. 'She caught the image of the kids I was writing about perfectly,' Cooper said later Photograph: Puffin Books/toucansurf.com

Gill’s lack of recognition was cruelly underlined this year when a 1961 edition of Frances Hodgson Burnett's A Little Princess was reissued as a Puffin Classic. Margery's 24 pen-and-ink illustrations for the book were among her best work. But on the title page her surname was mistakenly printed as Hill Photograph: Puffin Books/toucansurf.com

Gill’s output slowed in the late 1970s as fashions changed and more children's books were illustrated by cartoons Photograph: Puffin Books/toucansurf.com