"To Hand out the Stars": Jane Langton's Fiction for Children

I'm in Concord, Massachusetts, home of the Transcendentalists—Thoreau, Emerson—and of Louisa May Alcott. Concord is also home of author Jane Langton, creator of the fantastical Hall family series for children, among others. She and I had planned to meet, but she has fallen ill.

I have been a decades-long fan of her work since reading Diamond in the Window (1962) and the Swing in the Summerhouse (1967), shortly after their publication. When I was almost fifty, I read her most recent publication for children, The Dragon Tree (2008). To say her works have grown with me is an understatement.

As my husband drives into Concord's downtown, I see the prototype for the Hall family's house, with its cunning turret and seemingly magical sensibilities. Sadly, it has no diamond in the window. Its front is littered with cars; in fact, it seems to have been made into a duplex, as two mailboxes perch outside and account, in part, for the many vehicles (none of them are The Green Hornet from the series).

Brother and sister Eleanor and Eddy, in the series, live here, after their parents' death, with their guardians, the seemingly simpleminded Uncle Freddy and his sister Aunt Lily. A later transformation, caused by a blow to the head, makes him once more the knowledgeable Professor Frederick T. Hall, who marries "the witch next door," mother of Georgie. Aunt Lily marries the enigmatic Prince Krishna, who even when absent, weaves his well-intended magic in the eight Hall family chronicles, written over a span of several decades. His gifts, such as a magic swing, bike, and stereoscope, are the catalysts for the children's quests. Dark magic becomes all the more eerie by the routine nature of such actions as swinging and cycling. The astonishing stereoscope is the lens into the fantastical worlds of all eight shape-shifting novels, realistic family dramas on one hand that fracture like Escher works into something different.

Concord is resplendent with churches that I know thanks to Langton's pen and ink drawings in her adult mysteries, but especially thanks to The Astonishing Stereoscope (1971), with its fearful contest of good versus evil. When a student, John Green, falls from the roof, Eleanor fears it is her fault and worries she will go to "the Bad Place," introduced in the book's opening sentence. In her quandary, she attends First Parish Church, just around the corner from her house, more faint at heart over the new ritual of taking the host and drinking the cup of blood, than in the fantastic encounter she shares with Eddy and the "weird goddess," an encounter with the spectre of human sacrifice. The intervention of Herm, the cross-eyed family cat, saves the chosen victim. Later, the children encounter biology and zoology when they enter Herm's body for a guided tour of the wonders of nature, of "cells and molecules and worlds within worlds." Wise Uncle Freddy says, "[T]he only unforgivable Sin is believing the Unforgivable Sin," but the siblings must explore religion, evolution, and creation for themselves, in a work that is adult in its sensibilities but childlike in its milieu.

A walk along Lexington Road, awash with flags, brings us to Orchard House, home of Louisa May Alcott and her family. In Diamond, Eleanor and Edward embark on a strange quest, articulated in a poem, "Transcendental Treasure," its verses scratched into the window of their newly discovered turreted room. In search of one of the gifts ("The second is a doll-child, / Possessed by one of four, / Fit for any princess/to mother and adore."), believing it to be associated with Little Women, they enter Alcott House.

Their tour guide, the indomitable Madeleine Prawn, secretary to the town's banker who is the arch enemy, is nothing like our sweet-faced, dulcet-toned East Indian guide, who could be a relative of Prince Krishna, though she does reprimand my husband for leaning against the bed jamb in Alcott's room. Bronson Alcott's School of Philosophy could well have been the...