Reflecting on Girls' Series

The 1990s are exciting years for scholars interested in girls' series books. An ever increasing number of researchers, many of them influenced by feminism, are studying these popular texts, which have been phenomenally successful throughout the twentieth century. Other critics are turning to these books in order to understand their enduring role in culture and the ways they shape the values of future women. Scholars such as Kathleen Chamberlain, Deidre Johnson, and Nancy Tillman Romalov all have done substantial work in the girls' series field. Johnson's Edward Stratemeyer and the Stratemeyer Syndicate (1993) is particularly noteworthy for its thorough scholarship and its chapter on girls' series. Less known than these three critics is Catherine Sheldrick Ross, whose painstakingly researched essay, "If They Read Nancy Drew, So What? Series Book Readers Talk Back" (1995), provides what is probably the most thorough study of series book readers and their motivations. She argues in this essay that "series books do not enfeeble readers or render them unfit for reading anything else" (233). Chamberlain, Johnson, Romalov, and Ross, along with some earlier writers such as Carol Billman and Betsy Caprio, have worked to deepen critics' understanding of girls' series. Now, two new works have been added to the growing number of scholarly books addressing girls' series. Actually, Bobbie Ann Mason's The Girl Sleuth (1995) cannot technically be considered a "new" book because it was first published in 1975, but its republication in 1995 will certainly attract a new readership to this classic work in the field. Along with Mason's study, Carolyn Stewart Dyer and Nancy Tillman Romalov's carefully edited collection of essays about Nancy Drew should also interest new scholars in the exploits of Nancy and other series heroines.

Mason's is the less scholarly of the two books, but because she did not revise the book, she has not had the opportunity to benefit from the last two decades of critical work on girls' series, as have the writers included in Dyer and Romalov's collection. I should also caution that Mason's book is not intended as a rigorous, definitive text about girls' series. Rather, The Girl Sleuth is the award-winning writer's personal reflections about the significance of girls' series for her during her childhood. Although Mason discusses how other girls might read series books, her focus is chiefly on her own reaction to these books when she was growing up on a remote Kentucky farm where she had "to feed the chickens and milk the cows everyday" (4). Because of the personal tone and jargon-free prose, her book, even twenty years later, is still a good starting place for academics and general readers interested in girls' series.

The Girl Sleuth was Mason's first book, and it displays the keen sense of humor so apparent in some of her better known works: Feather Crowns, In Country, Shiloh and Other Stories, and Love Life: Stories. The Girl Sleuth was the result of its author's attempt to recuperate after a long period immersed in the arcane issues of graduate school. She recovered by turning to beloved books from her childhood: girls' series books featuring heroines like Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton, and similar detectives. The Girl Sleuth is Mason's reflection on the profound effect these books had on her childhood and those of countless other girls. As she comments, "I read them all: Nancy Drew, Judy Bolton, Beverly Gray, Kay Tracey, the Dana Girls, Vicki Barr, Cherry Ames. I was an authority on each of them. But they were also my authorities, the source of my dreams" (4). In 1975, her attention to these series books and others marked her as someone ahead of her time, because she pointed out the significance of studying series books when they were still largely disregarded by teachers, librarians, and scholars. Moreover, Mason connected girls' series books to the burgeoning feminist movement and at one point...