The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf (review)

And I did have meditations about what things the eyes of potatoes do see there in the ground. I have thinks they do have seeing of black velvet moles and large earthworms that do get short in a quick way . . . Being a potato must be interest, specially the having so many eyes. I have longings for more eyes—there is so much to see in this world all about.

(61)

Clearly this 1904 diary entry from six-year-old Opal Whiteley is a childish piece of writing full of syntactical errors, but it is also brilliantly inventive, metaphorically attentive, vocationally writerly, and intensely empathetic with tiny things. Is this brilliance from a six-year-old pathology or fraud or literature? The editors of The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf will allow us only one answer.

Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster make a powerful case for juvenilia as significant literature in their surprising and beautifully edited book about children's literature that is produced by, not for, children. The book treats thirteen young writers in detail and provides an excellent annotated bibliography for more. As Alexander's essay on editorial practices and reception makes plain, the publication of juvenilia has long been impeded by the embarrassment of adult authors about their early works and more often by the condescension of editors. Both Alexander and Rachel Brownstein comment on R. W. Chapman's reluctance to publish Jane Austen's juvenilia in 1933: "[I]t may be that we have enough already of Jane Austen's early scraps" (80). But, alas, "The only sure way to prevent it is the way of destruction, which no one dare take" (124).

The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf is organized and substantially written by McMaster and Alexander (along with ten other contributors), the former the founding editor of Juvenilia Press, the latter the present General Editor. Continuing the press's work, this volume makes a critical case for more scholarship in the field. The editors' explicit definition of juvenilia is simply work completed by writers under age twenty; however, the implicit definition of virtually all the contributors is that juvenilia is self-generated and self-conscious writing of children who already conceive themselves to be writers. Juvenilia implies a sphere of childhood freedom that allows for voluntary writing by self-authorizing children. "At four I first mounted Pegasus," Elizabeth Barrett recorded in the autobiographical essay written at fourteen (138). The ten-year-old John Ruskin worried his mother by his self-willed "beginning too eagerly and becoming careless towards the end of his works as he calls them" (203). A habitual theme of these nineteenth-century children's texts is the child writer's conscious need to write in order to expand the self beyond the bounds of what is permitted. Seven-year-old Iris Vaughan confides to "a diry a diray a diery" (65): "Every one should have a diery. Becos life is too hard with the things one must say to be perlite and the things one must not say to lie" (64). And in Alexander's formulation, the adolescent Charlotte Brontë conceives herself "as necessarily a Fiction; a construct of fragmented voices" (161), as more a product of her own writing than of flesh and blood. Brontë writes, "It seemed as if I was a non-existent shadow, that I neither spoke, eat, imagined or lived of myself, but I was the mere idea of some other creature's brain" (160).

The ages of the young people under discussion range from the six-year-old Whiteley to Branwell Brontë, still committed to his boyhood Angria world at thirty. Most of the authors profiled—Austen, Lord Byron, Barrett Browning, the Brontës, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Amy Levy, Mary Augusta Ward—are highly productive teenagers, but others, like Daisy Ashford, author of The Young Visitors (1890), are under...