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  • A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women’s Lives ed. by Betsy Hearne, and Roberta Seelinger Trites
  • Nancy Kang (bio)
Hearne, Betsy, and Roberta Seelinger Trites, eds. A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women’s Lives. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2009.

On February 7, 2015, Google’s search page featured a doodle honoring the 148th birthday of Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957), the American children’s book author most recognized for the Little House on the Prairie series. Three months earlier, an unexpected explosion of interest accompanied the release of Wilder’s annotated autobiography Pioneer Girl, edited by Pamela Smith Hill and published by the South Dakota Historical Society. Google’s rustic image of Laura playing with her sister Mary coincides, perhaps serendipitously, with the media storm that arose earlier that week around the forthcoming publication of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman, the reclusive writer’s first major release since the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). Reading Betsy Hearne and Roberta Seelinger Trites’s co-edited A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women’s Lives is especially appropriate at this exciting time for scholars and consumers of children’s and adolescent literature. Most of the nineteen autobiographical essays deal with some influential work in the field, usually by Euro-American women like Ingalls Wilder and Lee, but not exclusively.

If the title of the collection were the needle of a compass, it proves a bit too wobbly at first: readers find themselves in rewarding territory by the end of the journey but somewhat confused by the initial orientation. More specifically than the title suggests, this volume is a set of memoirs by women academics, some early in their careers and others, like co-editor Hearne, retired after influential careers. What each chapter has in common is a meditation on a formative text, usually a work of children’s fiction, but not always; similarly, the authors of these formative texts tend to be women, but again, not always.

As is evident from these foregoing observations, the main point of improvement for this thought-provoking collection may be structural: some readers might prefer a more predictable configuration of one children’s text complementing the insights of one memoirist. [End Page 1177] The compilation as it currently stands uses three thematic groupings to organize its contents: “Finding the Compass,” “Literary and Critical Directions,” and “Escaping Home, Finding Home.” These are very broad categories. Of course, the ostensible “messiness” of the formatting also emulates the stuff of life, namely troubled childhoods, sudden deaths, agonizing illnesses, miscarriages, and the difficult path to tenure—an intellectual home—which is not uniform by any stretch of the imagination. After all, success for women academics defies a consistent and predictable course. Ann Hendricks, a professor of health policy and management, was not influenced by the same literary characters—or even the same linguistic system—as American Indian studies specialist Ofelia Zepeda. Narrative compasses like this collection are definitely edifying, if not imperative, and underscore the need for ongoing cross-generational and interdisciplinary conversations about how best to guide women in and beyond the labyrinths of academe.

Included among the inspirational literary texts are Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911), Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868–1869), Dorothy Sterling’s Mary Jane (1959), Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series (1935–1971), and Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908). All the protagonists in this group of texts are young, white women save in Sterling’s novel, which features an African American teenager as its heroine. No black woman writer receives similar attention, although Maria Tatar’s erudite essay makes a passing reference to Richard Wright’s feeling of enchantment at the tale of Bluebeard, a character predictably associated with Western European literary history (43). Other sources of inspiration for the collection’s authors are more diverse, at least generically speaking: these include the Bible, the Nancy Drew mysteries (ghostwritten under the pseudonym Carolyn Keene), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), and various fairy tales mostly from Europe, including those...

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