The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf (review)

Perhaps the most striking image in this collection of essays is not from a child-writer, but from Henry James: the image of Maisie Farange gazing from outside through 'the hard window-pane of the sweetshop of knowledge', which for Juliet McMaster 'epitomizes the crisis of the child's urgent need for knowledge in the face of knowledge denied' (52). When the child becomes a child-writer, she argues, the thirstfor knowledge about the adult world is accompanied by a quest for language to articulate it. The result is often a rich brew of savage comedy, adult mimicry, sexual immorality, and general outright audacity, as the essays in this collection amply demonstrate.

When it first began, two to three decades ago, formal teachingand study of children's literature by academics in universities aroused hostility in some quarters, especially in the United States. Either lecturers were 'dumbing down' by teaching 'kiddie-lit', or else theywere encroaching on the rightful ground of librarians and educational theorists. With children's literature now widely accepted as a legitimate discipline, the next stage logically is to open the field to writing by children. Children's literature, after all, is rarely by children (with the notable exception of Daisy Ashford), and as Jacqueline Rose has famously argued, 'sets up a world in which the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product, receiver)'. ¹ Whereas adult writers for children traditionally reconfigure the child's world both as they think children see it, and as they wish them to see it, this innovative book of essays considers what happens when children seize control of literary production for themselves, in a wide range of genres from collaborative family newspapers and sagas to romantic and historical novels.

The book is structured to take account of the newness of juvenilia as a critical field. It divides into a more general theoretical section, which includes an invaluable chapter by Christine Alexander on the publication and editing of work by child-writers (defined in the book as a whole as the under-twenties), as well as a helpful overview of the field, which will be unfamiliar to many. I was certainly unaware of just how many mainstream Victorian novelists and poets had written extensive and coherent juvenilia, which are still extant. Alexander is herself General Editor and Director of a new publishing venture, the Juvenilia Press, which was founded by the book's other co-editor, Juliet McMaster in 1994, to publish literary juvenilia in editions prepared by postgraduate students with the support of experienced academics. The essay collection is supplemented by an invaluable annotated bibliography of nineteenth-century juvenilia. Although this is limited to works which have already been published in some form, many are no longer readily available, and the Juvenilia Press is therefore gradually making increasing numbers of these titles accessible in scholarly editions.

Christine Alexander is already the highly respected editor of a multi-volume edition of the early writings of Charlotte Brontë, while Juliet McMaster is an acclaimed Austen scholar. Austen and Brontë are indeed the best-known writers of juvenilia, and their work is well represented in this volume: the middle section of the book, however, consists of essays on individual authors not especially famed for their juvenilia, such as George Eliot, John Ruskin, Amy Levy, and Mary Augusta Ward (a surprising omission, perhaps, is Daisy Ashford, who is mentioned several times in passing, but there is no analysis of The Young Visiters). Read as a collection, the essays quickly develop key themes which are common to many of the child-authors, and together rebutthe common prejudices against the literary merits of juvenile writing. Apprentice-work it undoubtedly is, by definition, but what detractors underestimate is its witty outspokenness and fruitful experimentalism. As Alexander persuasively argues, writing by children is the work of a 'nascent consciousness' (155), often a nakedly direct observer of the adult world...