It is easy to dismiss such projects as mere marketing ploys. Earlier this month, we had Tanya Landman’s “truly accessible” version of Jane Eyre which follows recent rewrites of everything from Kipling’s Jungle Book to Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers, in which we see the arrival of a girl from India. This drive to update the classics for young readers is the new rage in publishing. Like the original, it will feature three adopted children called the Fossils, but the ballet dancer will now be a boy, and the palaeontologist Great Uncle Matthew, who adopts the children, has been replaced by a pebble collector called Great Aunt Maude. According to her editor, Fletcher’s version of the novel will remain very “Ballet Shoes-y”, but in a contemporary and “slightly alternative” London setting. This delicate task has been entrusted to Carrie Hope Fletcher, an actress and YouTube star who has written several novels, though never one for children. So why, oh why is her estate allowing Ballet Shoes, her 1936 masterpiece about three orphaned sisters preparing for a life on the stage, to be rewritten “for the modern era”?

One rediscovered title, The Theatre Cat, is described by its publisher as “a charming time capsule of a story” – which is surely the key to much of Streatfeild’s appeal. In the last seven months alone, she has had three new children’s books published, including a collection of short stories found buried among her papers more than 30 years after her death.

Noel Streatfeild would be on one heck of a publicity tour if she were alive today. Updating the classics is all the rage in publishing, but will it really attract new readers?

Ballet shoes book series