A Secure World of Childhood: The Artistry of Elizabeth Enright

This consideration of the life work of Elizabeth Enright by long-time ChLA member and past president J. D. Stahl (1952–2010) first appeared in The Hollins Critic in April 1998. We are reprinting it here in the format in which it appeared in the Critic, with a new introduction by Brian Attebery, who wrote on Enright for Children’s Literature in in his 2009 essay “Elizabeth Enright and the Family Story as Genre.”

Introduction: Insights and Good Company

The reader who has not encountered J. D. Stahl’s discussion of Elizabeth Enright’s fiction is in for a double treat. Enright is one of the great stylists of children’s literature: a keen observer of place, emotion, and character who couched her observations in fresh, precise language. Stahl is one of the great appreciators: his reading is likewise precise, detailed, and often surprising. My own test of critical writing is whether it adds to the experience of going back to the text. After reading Stahl, one cannot help but appreciate Enright all the more. Stahl’s way of integrating biography, close reading and thematic analysis invites us to go back to Enright’s novels—the Melendy books, the Newbery-Award winning Thimble Summer, the two stories of decay and renewal in an abandoned resort known as Gone-Away Lake—and quietly suggests ways to pay attention to their artistry as well as their charm.

In writing about Enright, it is difficult to resist quoting her, but I can resist the temptation because J. D. has already done such a fine job of selecting, framing, and illuminating samples of her sentences. Quoting well is also an art, like curating an exhibit, and reading Stahl’s essay is like walking through a special collection with the best of docents. “Look there,” he says, and we see how light is refracted by the water, how the curve of a cheek is echoed in a vase. And then he adds just the right piece of information about the artist’s life or other work; in this case, especially Enright’s writing for adult audiences, which most readers of her children’s books have probably not encountered.

This sort of reading might sound old fashioned, untheorized. I don’t believe that is the case, however. Stahl’s reading is based on more than just taste and common sense (which are always more ideological, more theoretically grounded than we might assume). The kinds of questions he asks distill debates from stylistics, narratology, and literary history, but the theoretical perspective I find most persuasive within his analysis comes from folklore. What Stahl refers to as “the narrative bridging of generations” is the work of traditional culture. He invites us to look at Enright’s ways of representing communities, nuances of social interaction, and the role of storytelling in constructing identities and relationships. Stahl, who translated works of German folklore scholarship, wrote a book about Mark Twain’s immersion in culture, and created a course on myth and folklore for the Graduate Program in Children’s Literature at Hollins University, was deeply interested in traditional customs and modes of expression. For a folklorist, everything is contextual, layered, and as Mikhael Bakhtin would say, double-voiced. In Enright’s children’s books, some of that doubleness comes from the adult perspective that underlies the more comical, less troubled voices of children. As Stahl points out, Enright’s stories for the New Yorker and other adult venues can be haunted, even bitter: that darkness is kept at a distance in her writing for children but once one is aware of it, it adds complexity and resonance. The communities within her work, including the families she made so appealing, function as folk groups, dynamic and ever-changing and yet maintaining their identity and values over time.

A note of poignancy about this re-publication is that J. D. Stahl and Elizabeth Enright died all too young, both at the age of 58. Each could have contributed more to our understanding of childhood and its joys. Yet we can be...