Josephine Pullein-Thompson obituary

Once asked why so many girls develop a passion for ponies, the novelist Josephine Pullein-Thompson, who has died aged 90, declared, "they need something to love, to nurture. It keeps them off pop stars!" In the equestrian novels that she, her mother Joanna Cannan and her younger twin sisters Diana and Christine, wrote nearly 200 between them riding horses was also the way that girls could show that they were just as good as boys, if not better. Their heroines relished mucking out stables and the freedom of galloping away across the countryside, and the pluckiest were able to turn bedraggled nags into rosette-winning champions, later returning home to celebrate with a truly "supersonic tea".

The stories were drawn from the girls' own experience of growing up in an unconventional household, initially in a suburban villa in Wimbledon, but subsequently in a much larger but somewhat down-at-heel dower house called The Grove in the village of Peppard in south Oxfordshire, which had its own stables. The girls were soon obsessed with horses and became champion eventers.