Examining Streatfeild through a feminist lens

Nancy Huse’s Noel Streatfeild is a strong example of the best of feminist literary analysis. Huse examines the prolific writer’s oeuvre through a feminist lens, identifying consistent patterns in Streatfeild’s novels while she simultaneously models thorough feminist analysis for the reader.

Streatfeild is best known to American readers as the author of the classic children’s novel Ballet Shoes (1936). Over ten million copies of the book that Huse rightly identifies as a girls’ classic have been sold in the sixty years since the book’s publication (39, 145). When it first appeared, customers were rationed as to how many copies they could buy (17, 45). But Huse also brings to the reader’s attention Streatfeild’s many literary accomplishments: the British author wrote close to thirty adult novels (including romances under the pen name “Susan Scarlett”), four plays, a successful radio series, many works of nonfiction for adults and children, and over thirty-five works of fiction for children. Huse makes a strong argument for the place of three of these last, Ballet Shoes, Party Shoes (1945; British title, Party Frock), and The Magic Summer (1966; British title, The Growing Summer), in the ongoing study of children’s literature. Huse resoundingly supports her thesis: “Exploring the tensions of heredity and environment in both adult and children’s books, Streatfeild anticipated many contemporary questions about the role of women, the structure of the family, and the implications of the class system” (x).

Streatfeild grew up as the daughter of an English vicar; she lived through two world wars and continued publishing until she was eighty-one. One of Huse’s strongest contributions to feminist scholarship is her analysis of the connections between Streatfeild’s biography and her literary works. The literary criticism of Streatfeild’s semi-autobiographical vicarage books—A Vicarage Family (1963), Away from the Vicarage (1965), and Beyond the Vicarage (1971)—problematizes facile distinctions between autobiography and fiction to demonstrate how by “noting what is placed in the foreground and speculating on the purposes served by particular narrative structures—we can draw from the complicated definition of self-construction in autobiography sketched by Heilbrun and others” (135–36).

Huse also makes a convincing case for the readability of Streatfeild’s adult novels, even while she mourns their lack of current availability. Her analysis of Streatfeild’s first novel, The Whicharts (1931), as a prototype of Ballet Shoes provides an invaluable historical context for the children’s novel that should affect permanently the critical interpretation of Ballet Shoes. Huse identifies a tripartite theme in Streatfeild’s early novels for adults that affected her subsequent writing for children: “Questions about the family as an institution—which are also central to the liberation of women—include the challenge of imagining nonoppressive family relationships, of identifying children’s real needs to mature into healthy adults, and perhaps of considering the possible benefits of some form of sexual repression” (27). Huse notes that Streatfeild eliminates sexual repression from her books for children but otherwise maintains consistent themes about nurturing family structures and “children’s need to experience competence and material sustenance as interrelated, satisfying parts of daily experience” (40).

One of the most useful aspects of this book, then, is the synthesis of themes found in Streatfeild’s children novels. Huse delineates how a number of these interwoven themes create the fabric of Streatfeild’s fiction for juveniles, including the role of a nanny or surrogate female caretaker in nurturing children; the importance of children’s learning being encouraged so that they can explore opportunities for economic independence, especially those that evolve from artistic expression; the valorization of rebellious daughters’ voices; the support siblings can provide one another; the significance of domestic management; the love that can be generated in multigenerational and multiclass nontraditional families; the need for courage during times of war and national duress; a respect for nature; and the joy animals, especially dogs, can bring to families. In the process of demonstrating how these themes work, Huse’s formidable knowledge of...