The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf (review)

The publication by Cambridge University Press of this volume of essays on the work of young writers marks the full emergence of juvenilia as a subject of scholarly study. Readers of ESC have had a privileged view of the construction of this new discipline. In 1996, Juliet McMaster, one of the editors of the current collection, first reported in the journal on the editing project she was leading at the University of Alberta to publish the apprentice works of canonical writers and to give students experience in scholarly editing. In 1998, she, along with two of the apprentice editors, reflected on the critical and theoretical implications of their work. By the time she discussed the editorial principles articulated and refined through practice in 2001, the Juvenilia Press had published twenty-six volumes and was extending its mandate to include important work by child authors who did not continue to write as adults. Since then, the Press has relocated to the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where it is directed by Christine Alexander, the other editor of this collection, and is overseen by an international board of contributing editors from Canada, the United States, Britain, New Zealand, Japan, and Australia. As the annotated bibliography by Lesley Peterson and Leslie Robertson included in this volume indicates, the number of publications alone has made the Press an important force in producing an object of study. The collection at hand makes it clear that scholars affiliated with the Press are also at the forefront of the ongoing work of mapping the new field.

The volume is divided into two unequal parts. The first part comprises four chapters, three by Christine Alexander and one by Juliet McMaster, in which the editors define terms, sketch the history of the editing and publication of juvenilia, catalogue subgenres, propose sets of generic characteristics, and explain and discuss a number of theoretical approaches to the study of juvenilia. The second part is made up of ten essays by ten writers, including one by each of the editors, essays that focus on the apprentice texts of individual, canonical writers, as well as the annotated bibliography already mentioned, compiled by assistant editors of the Juvenilia Press, of primary and secondary sources for the study of nineteenth century juvenilia.

Broadly speaking, there are two recurrent concerns in the essays of the second part. The dominant interest is in the relation of the early writings to the later work for which the writer is known and suggests that the primary audience for these essays are other specialists in the study of the particular writers under discussion. The bibliography confirms that such work constitutes the bulk of the scholarship on juvenilia. Several of the essays assume a developmental model of artistic change and trace the growth of the writer into her or his characteristic subjects and styles: among these are the pieces by Rachel M. Brownstein on Jane Austen and Lord Byron, Victor A. Neufeldt on Branwell Brontë, Juliet McMaster on George Eliot, and Daniel Shealy on Louisa May Alcott. In other of the essays, the relations between early and later writings turn out to be considerably more complicated than any simple division into apprentice and "mature" work: Beverly Taylor, for example, demonstrates that Elizabeth Barrett Browning's understanding of the function of poetry as a tool for assessing "the society she inhabits" is evident from the earliest extant poem (140); Gillian E. Boughton documents the ways in which Mary Ward's "energetic experimentation" in her juvenilia recapitulates major shifts in the development of English fiction in the nineteenth century (251); Margaret Anne Doody argues that a study of Jane Austen's juvenile work reveals that she had to prune "a good deal of her own ruthless and exuberant style of comic vision in order to be published" (119); and Naomi Hetherington, working with the writing of Amy Levy, explicitly recasts the child-to-adult trajectory as a movement from amateur writer to professional writer, as...