Mark also has the same homeschooling teacher as Marianne, Miss Chesterfield (Patricia Maynard) although the two children have never met.

Marianne Dreams - Wikipedia

Anna keeps mentioning her father, and how she wants to see him, but we also find out that in the past he’s been drunk, and there’s some implication that he’s been threatening. Or Anna, at least says ‘I don’t like him when he’s drunk’. She had met the psychiatrist and author Anthony Storr (1920–2001) during her training and married him in 1942. They had three daughters, Sophia, Polly and Emma, but divorced in 1970. She later married the economist Lord Balogh (1905–1985). [6] Ren: It says when Marianne and Mark are escaping, they hear ‘the sound of steps behind, plodding, slow, like the pounding of a giant pestle in a huge mortar’.Ren: I think they wanted to rehabilitate the image of him after the horrifying dream father sequence. Because he seems pretty decent. Adam: The father is almost notably absent, I’d say, in Marianne Dreams. He’s mentioned maybe twice, but very much isn’t present, interestingly. So I thought that the film maybe reflected that by having the father not present, and being away for his work. Adam: (still laughing) Oh, that’s brilliant. Now I’m going to try and make Bergman connections. No, I don’t really think… Adam: Yeah, I’d agree with that. In the book you get the sense that she’s on the long road to recovery, as it were, and the worst part of it is the boredom. So the drawing becomes a respite from the daily boredom. Whereas in the film, its more that she’s got the heady, out of it thing going on because she’s feverish.

Marianne Dreams by Catherine Storr - LoveReading4Kids

Ali: I think in the book, you never really know for sure, but the dream world is definitely treated as being real in terms of the narrative. Whereas in the film, it seemed to make more sense, at least, if you read it as being fever dreams. And the illness is much more linked to the dreams. There is nobody in the house so when Marianne awakes again she draws a boy at an upstairs window – a companion during her next dream visit. As it turns out the boy, Mark (Steven Jones) is also in bed in the real world – seriously ill with polio and unable to walk – and has now been pulled into her alternative world.

Film critic Roger Ebert gave Paperhouse four stars out of four and called it "a film in which every image has been distilled to the point of almost frightening simplicity" and ended by saying "this is not a movie to be measured and weighed and plumbed, but to be surrendered to." [3] Ali: Yeah, I felt like one of the things that I really liked about the book was that it was quite tightly structured. There’s quite a logical progression between the different dreams, and then she draws something else as a consequence of that dream, and then theres another dream and the consequences of what she’s just drawn are revealed. The film’s pretty erratic, in terms of how her drawing is motivated.