Lauren Brooke wrote the Heartland series
Lauren Brooke is a pseudonym used by three authors: Linda Chapman (whose idea the series was) wrote most of the books in the series, with Gill Harvey and Elisabeth Grace contributing some titles. Linda wasn’t responsible for the Chestnut Hill books. Those were written by Catherine Hapka and Elisabeth Faith.
And Lucy Daniels?
Also doesn’t exist, I’m afraid. Many, many authors have written books for the Animal Ark series but none of them is called Lucy Daniels.
And Judith M Berrisford?
The author of the Jackie series was husband-and-wife team Clifford and Mary Lewis (née Berrisford).
Jill’s pony Black Boy was called Best Boy in some reprints of the Jill books.
No. Not in one single, solitary edition. Over the years, I’ve checked just about every edition of the books, from the 1960s onwards (and that’s a lot. I have a spreadsheet of them). Best Boy appears to be a myth propagated on the Ruby Ferguson Wikipedia page, and it’s now been deleted.
Black Boy was called Danny Boy in some reprints of the Jill books.
Ah, now you have something, though only a small something. In the 1968 Knight reprint of Jill’s Gymkhana, Black Boy has been renamed Danny Boy. In every single other edition, he’s Black Boy. It’s just the version below in which he’s Danny Boy. In all other titles in that edition, the pony is Black Boy, which must have confused readers more than somewhat.
Black Boy was piebald
He was. But in the original editions, he’s black. To confuse matters a bit more, he appears as a skewbald on the covers of at least one of the 1960s Knight editions (like the one above, in fact).
There were eleven books in the Jill series
There were actually nine: Pony Jobs for Jill became Challenges for Jill, and Jill Enjoys Her Ponies changed into Jill and the Runaway. I got very excited in the early days of my pony book research when I found these titles as I thought they were Jill books I hadn’t read. Alas, no: they’d just been re-titled in the 1980s, presumably as the publishers felt that in a less innocent age the titles were open to misinterpretation.
Are there any other pony book myths you know of? Please let me know in the comments.
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