Margery Gill, who has died aged 83, was a prolific and talented illustrator of children's books. She was greatly respected in the publishing industry but neither got, nor sought, the wider recognition she deserved. Her name may be little known, but her drawings, with their unmistakable style, will be familiar to many. She illustrated dozens of stories, poems, and anthologies at a time when children's books were beginning to reach a mass market.
Her 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 which her younger daughter modelled, were among her best work and they reprinted well. But on the title page her surname was mistakenly printed as Hill.
Margery was born in Coatbridge, in North Lanarkshire. Aged five, when an aunt asked what she was scribbling, Margery replied: "I don't scribble, I draw." She never displayed such haughtiness as an adult. In the early 1930s, the Gills moved to north-west London after Margery's father, Oscar, obtained a job at the Post Office's Dollis Hill research station, where he worked on developing the speaking clock.
Margery left grammar school at 14 to take a place at Harrow School of Art. She spent many nights of the war on the school roof watching for fire bombs with the air raid protection wardens. In 1943 Margery met Paddy Jordan, a drama student, in a local bookshop. They were married three years later, by which time Margery was at the Royal College of Art (RCA). In the same year she illustrated her first book - A Child's Garden of Verses, by Robert Louis Stevenson, which was published by Oxford University Press.
She juggled her early career with studying and looking after her two daughters. Working from home - a flat in Fulham Road, west London - she did several other commissions for the OUP before being taken on by Bodley Head. John Ryder, its design and art director, had exacting standards. He said the study of etching and engraving Margery had made at the RCA "interfered with, rather than aided" her early work.
But by the 1950s her style of pen-and-ink drawings became much bolder, and Ryder and others began to champion her work. One of her best books at this time was Blue Day (1958) by René Guillot, which the Observer said was "worth buying for the illustrations alone". Margery also began working as a drawing teacher at Maidstone College of Art. She used to take the train from Victoria with a young fellow teacher, David Hockney, and Quentin Crisp, who modelled at the college.
She did her first colour illustrations for Bodley Head in 1960. "We adored her," said Judy Taylor, the children's books editor. "She drew beautifully for us in both line and colour."
By the 1960s, Margery was a sought-after illustrator. Her realistic style suited the era of kitchen sink dramas. Her sometimes solemn drawings of children underlined a new attitude to the young. Children were no longer to be talked down to, but taken seriously. Margery's drawings, which presented a lively and unsanitised view of childhood, were in vogue. But always modest, she shunned the opportunity to exhibit her work.
Eleanor Graham, the first editor of Puffin, was keen to sign her up. She was not disappointed. In a note she wrote: "I'm waiting for the second batch of Margery Gill's drawings to be brought to me - the first batch was just perfect." Her drawings were also much admired by the author and illustrator Shirley Hughes, Margery's more celebrated contemporary. Hughes said: "I thought her work was terrific. It made me look to my laurels. It was modern - the children she depicted were less sweet. Margery used solid black line with tremendous fluidity and ease: the way her children stood and moved was very distinctive."
Margery 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. At the time, publishers liked to keep authors and illustrator apart. Fortunately Margery had a knack of drawing exactly what authors wanted. "She caught the image of the kids I was writing about perfectly, with no communication. That does huge things for the confidence of a writer," said Cooper.
In 1969, Margery and Paddy had moved to a cottage in west Suffolk, next door to a young family, which included me. I remember her as a woman who smoked and laughed a lot. She was neat and careful, and often rubbed her hands with glycerine to keep them supple. She sometimes asked me to pose for her, but only briefly, just long enough to work out a detail she had got stuck on. She was a perfectionist, but never precious or pretentious. She continually revised her work by scratching out lines with a scalpel. She would also throw lots of drawings away - a binman in Fulham had a collection of her work.
"Every drawing is a fight which I really enjoy. I enjoy, too, the failures, and starting again," she once said. At low moments she also threatened to burn her work, though it was generally rescued by Paddy.
Her output slowed in the 1970s as fashions changed and more children's books were illustrated by cartoons. She survived breast cancer in the mid-1980s. Her last book was Pennies for the Dog, by Ann Thwaite, in 1985. After that, arthritis in her hands made drawing painful and, for the first time, she could also afford not to work. Paddy had secured a relatively lucrative role in the soap opera Crossroads, after a string of small parts in films.
In retirement Margery enjoyed gardening and voluntary work. She rarely talked about her drawings. When she was told that her name was wrong on the reissue of A Little Princess, she just laughed.
She is survived by her husband, her older daughter, four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Her younger daughter predeceased her.
• Margery Jean Gill, illustrator, born April 5 1925; died October 31 2008