The New Girl: Girls' Culture in England, 1880-1915, and: Regendering the School Story: Sassy Sissies and Tattling Tomboys (review)

A number of recent books have studied the intersections of age, gender, class, and reading in the formation of nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture and subjectivities. Both Sally Mitchell’s The New Girl and Beverly Clark’s Regendering the School Story are significant contributions to these critical and theoretical conversations. There is some overlap in the texts Mitchell and Clark discuss, signaling, perhaps, the emergence of some consensus about the texts it is useful for scholars in the field to know: for example, both use Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749) and L. T. Meade’s many school stories of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as markers of specific sets of narrative practices and cultural attitudes. Much scholarly energy has been expended in recent decades in interrogating the notion of “great books” and in resisting the tyranny of canons. Those of us working with popular juvenile books, however, must contend with a consequence of canonical thinking less often addressed. Because these texts rarely enter any canon, it is quite possible that no one else in the academy has actually read the books we’re studying. Sharing texts with a community of readers is a pleasure but also, I suspect, a necessary condition for enabling the new knowledges being created to change our conceptualizations of literature. And both Mitchell and Clark do challenge readers to stretch their understandings of the cultural function and the value of texts typically ignored by critics of children’s literature.

Sally Mitchell’s emphasis in The New Girl is on the cultural function of the girls’ books that became a standard feature of the list of every British publisher by the end of the nineteenth century. She argues that girlhood as a separate category of childhood was, to some extent, written into being by the books and magazines produced “for girls,” which “authorized a change in outlook and supported inner transformations that had promise for transmuting woman’s ‘nature’” (3). At the same time, however, she cautions that distinctions must be made between the cultural reality of the idea of “the new girl” and the material reality of girls’ lives, acknowledging that few “girls of the period actually lived a dramatically altered life” from that of girls earlier in the century (3). Mitchell’s focus on the cultural idea of “the new girl” means that she is not primarily interested in individual authors or texts, although she begins the volume by considering the “case” of L. T. Meade, one of the most prolific and popular writers for girls of the period. Her evaluation of Meade’s achievement sets the terms for the rest of the study: girls’ culture is “occupied by change, moving erratically toward the modern world, self-consciously ‘new’, but still driven by powerful (and unexamined) old feelings” (22).

As the introductory chapter makes clear, Mitchell is concerned to consider the variations and contradictions at work in the idea of girls’ culture, as well as to trace major themes and interests manifested in girls’ books and magazines. The next four chapters are delightfully complex and dense with references to hundreds of girls’ books and stories, organized around major themes but also calling attention to the tensions that structure the themes: the representation of girls’ work as a separate and extended stage between puberty and marriage; the representation of college life as a validation of a girl’s “obligation to develop herself” (73); the representation of school life as an opportunity for the exploration of peer ethics and authority; and the representation of sports and physical adventure as training for the new girl’s “mental life as a boy” (138).

In the sixth chapter, Mitchell turns to a more explicit examination of the meaning of reading for girls of the period and to an attempt to deduce these girls’ “particular interior world...