What Maisie Knew: How Teaching Difficult Texts Helps Us Learn About Reading

In this paper I discuss What Maisie Knew in three different contexts, in relation to learning to read. First, I talk about my own experience of reading the novel, aged fourteen or fifteen—not understanding much, but piecing a reading together out of fragments, and feeling the novel's complexity as a promise of complexity in real things. I discuss teaching the novel to students, helping them build an understanding of its meaning from the bottom upwards, out of the detail of the text. Finally I discuss the novel's own preoccupation with a child's learning to perceive meaning and value in the life around her.