The “New-Formed Leaves” of Juvenilia Press

April has brought the youngest time of year, With clinging cloaks of rain and mist, silver-gray; The velvet, star-wreathed night, and wind-clad day; And song of meadow larks from uplands near. The new-formed leaves unfold to greet the sun, Whose light is warming fields still moist with rain, While down each city street and grass-fringed lane, Children are shouting gladly as they run.

Margaret Laurence “Song for Spring, 1944, Canada”

The above octave from margaret laurence’s Petrarchan sonnet constructs parallels between the new-born, “youngest” time of year, the “new-formed leaves” of budding trees, and newly freed children bursting out from the confines of a long Canadian winter. Her “Song for Spring, 1944, Canada” is part of the collection Embryo Words: Margaret Laurence’s Early Writings (1997) published by Juvenilia Press. This press, founded by Juliet McMaster of the University of Alberta and now under the directorship of Christine Alexander at the University of New South Wales in Australia, publishes literary texts produced by children or teens.

Lest we dismiss the merit of such youthful writing, we need only recall that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein started as a piece of juvenilia.¹ The biased critical objection that Frankenstein is too good to have been written by a female teenager (and must have actually been written by Percy Shelley) is often leveled at young writers. Peter Paul Rubens and the Friendly Folk is a Juvenilia Press title containing text written by Opal Whitely at age six to seven, and its editor Lesley Peterson notes, “The diary was too good, it was argued, to be genuinely the production of a child so young” (vii).² Ultimately such incredulousness speaks more about the accuser than the writer. Why have reviewers historically been so closed to the possibility of works of genius coming from a young pen or a female pen or even more astonishingly a young, female pen?

Figure 1.

A portrait of a Victorian family “reading The Times on papyrus, with the leaders on the stalks, the advertisements neatly inserted between the fibres” (Carroll 80).

Margaret Laurence’s sonnet qualifies as juvenilia because she was only eighteen when it was composed. Her running children convey the sublime freedom and youthful exuberance expressed through many of the offerings printed by Juvenilia Press, and her poetic image of “new-formed leaves” (line 5) connotes the leaves of a freshly printed book or magazine. In his own juvenilia, Lewis Carroll deploys the double meaning of “leaf” to form the visual pun gracing the cover of Juvenilia Press’s edition of his Rectory Magazine (see figure 1).

This image conveys one key aspect of juvenilia: the inclusion of children as cultural interpreters who delight in comedy. Juxtaposed with the blasé adult responses is the small child’s readerly delight: “O, Ma! Here’s such a funny thing!” The child is the only one smiling and the sole user of exclamation marks. Carroll implies that a caricature may have triggered the child’s enthusiasm. Just as Margaret Laurence’s children shout “gladly,” so Carroll’s child exclaims gleefully. There is a joyful zeal in many of the fresh, energetic expressions reproduced by Juvenilia Press.

When considering juvenilia, however, we need also exercise some caution regarding overly idyllic images of youth. The young writer struggles too and can face adult-sized hardships. As editor Nora Stovel reminds Juvenilia Press readers, Laurence constructed her image of childhood verve and delight from the fraught home front of World War II.³ It is an image of momentary childlike freedom amidst widespread societal loss and grief. There is a darker side to the works published by Juvenilia Press, indicating that young writers are not naively oblivious to problems around them. The producers of juvenilia have valuable, keen perspectives. This sharp reality awareness is present in the young Jane Austen, writing in the turbulent years leading up to and during the French Revolution, the teenage Richard Doyle, satirizing the crowded streets of Victorian London, the nineteen-year-old Mary Grant Bruce...