Abstract
In 1886, Edward J. Salmon, discussing the wide range of books currently being written specifically for a young female audience, commented:
Girls’ literature performs one very useful function. It enables girls to read something above mere baby tales, and yet keeps them from the influence of novels of a sort which should be read only by persons capable of forming a discreet judgement.1
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Notes
Edward J. Salmon, ‘What Girls Read’, Nineteenth Century, vol. XX, no. 116 (1886), p.522.
Kimberley Reynolds, Girls Only?: Gender and Popular Children’s Fiction in Britain, 1880–1910 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1990), p.47.
Gillian Avery, Nineteenth Century Children (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965).
Julia Briggs, ‘Women Writers and Writing for Children: From Sarah Fielding to E. Nesbit’, in eds Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs, Children and Their Books (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). p.238.
Charlotte M. Yonge, ‘Children’s Literature of the Last Century’, Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. XX, nos. 117–19 (1869), p.449.
Ibid., p.309.
Ibid., p.453.
Ibid., p.454.
Ibid.
Reynolds, op.cit. Chapters 3 and 5.
Twentieth-century boys too have found girls’ stories attractive, even if they have been ashamed of admitting it. Fred Inglis, Professor of Education at Nottingham University and a specialist on children’s fiction, confesses to reading Alcott and Angela Brazil as a child, concealing the books’ bindings behind brown paper covers on which he had written ‘Billiards for Boys’ so as to keep their true identity hidden from his schoolmates. Inglis’s taste for works that were notably female in orientation and his furtiveness in reading them indicates the division that exists in assumptions about gendered reading. See Fred Inglis, The Promise of Happiness: Value and Meaning in Children’s Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p.65.
Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: the Cultural Work of American Fiction1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Martha Mary Sherwood, The History of the Fairchild Family (1818–1847), Part I, 17th edn (London: J. Hatchard, 1848), p.112.
Tompkins, op.cit.
Nina Baym, ‘Portrayal of Women in American Literature, 1790–1870’, in ed. Marlene Springer, What Manner of Woman: Essays on English and American Life and Literature (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977), pp.211–34.
The term ‘cult of domesticity’ is used by Nancy F. Cott in The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Women’s Sphere’ in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale, 1977). Other relevant studies of the relationship between women’s lives and the fiction of the period, in England and America, are Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), and Anne Scott McLeod, ‘The Caddie Woodlawn Syndrome: American Girlhood in the Nineteenth Century’, in Heininger et al., A Century of Childhood 1820–1920 (Rochester, NY: Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum, 1984), pp.97–119.
Reynolds, op.cit., p.96.
See, for example, Gillian Avery, Childhood’s Pattern: a Study of the Heroes and Heroines of Children’s Fiction, 1770–1950 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975),
See, for example, Gillian Avery, Childhood’s Pattern: a Study of the Heroes and Heroines of Children’s Fiction, 1770–1950 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1975), and J.S. Bratton, The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction (London: Croom Helm, 1981).
Mary Lynn Stevens Heininger, ‘Children, Childhood and Change in America’, in Heininger et al., op.cit.
Anne Scott McLeod, op.cit.
Susan Coolidge, Nine Little Goslings, 1875 (English edition, 1876), pp. 2–3.
Eleanor L. Sewell, ed., The Autobiography of Elizabeth M. Sewell (London: Longmans, Green, 1907), p.202.
Kathleen Tillotson, Novels of the Eighteen-Forties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, reprint 1962), p.5.
Nation, vol. 7 (22 October 1868), p.335; Harper’s, vol. 39 (August 1868) pp.455–6. Quoted in Alma J. Payne, ‘Louisa May Alcott’, American Literary Realism, vol. 6, no. 1 (Winter 1973), p.29.
Christabel Coleridge, Charlotte Mary Yonge: Her Life and Letters (London: Macmillan, 1903), p.152.
Figures from Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).
Tillotson, op.cit., p.136.
Maria Edgeworth, Tales and Novels, vol.I Moral Tales (London: George Routledge, 1893), p.282
Susan B. Warner [‘Elizabeth Wetherell’], The Wide, Wide World (New York: Feminist Press, 1987), pp.9–10.
[Charlotte M. Yonge], The Daisy Chain: or Aspirations (London: Macmillan, 1870), p.1.
Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden (Oxtord: World’s Classics, 1987), p.1.
John Stephens, Language and Ideology in Children’s Fiction (London: Longman, 1992), p.56.
Amy Cruse, The Victorians and Their Books (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1935), p.25.
Gillian Avery, ‘Home and Family: English and American Ideals in the Nineteenth Century’, in ed. Dennis Butts, Stories and Society: Children’s Literature in its Social Context (London: Macmillan, 1991), p.42.
Anne Scott McLeod, op.cit., p.104.
Avery, ‘Home and Family’, op.cit., p.46.
Alcott, Little Women (London: Puffin Books, 1953), p.171.
Ibid., p.183.
Tompkins, op.cit.
Gaye Tuchman, Edging Women Out: Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1989), p.143.
Louisa May Alcott, her Life, Letters and Journals, ed. Ednah D. Cheyney, (London: Sampson, Low and Marston; Searle and Rivington, 1889) pp.202–3.
See Anna B. Warner, Susan Warner (‘Elizabeth Wetherell’) (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909).
Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction (London: Macmillan, 1984), p.48.
E. Nesbit, The Wouldbegoods (London: Puffin Books, 1958), p.64.
See Juliet Dusinberre, Alice to the Lighthouse: Children’s Books and Radical Experiments in Art (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), p.44
Reynolds op.cit., p.105.
E. Nesbit, The Story of the Treasure Seekers (London: Puffin Books, 1958) p.54.
Lissa Paul, ‘Enigma Variations: What Feminist Theory Knows About Children’s Literature’, Signal, vol. 54 (September 1987), reprinted in
Peter Hunt, Children’s Literature: the Development of Criticism (London: Routledge, 1990), p.149.
Ibid., p.155.
Elaine Showalter ‘Towards a Feminist Poetics’, in ed. Mary Jacobus, Women Writing and Writing About Women (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p.25.
Nina Baym, Women’s Fiction: a Guide to Novels by and about Women in America1820–1870 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1978).
Judith Rowbotham, Good Girls make Good Wives: Guidance for Girls in Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989).
Chris Weedon, Feminist Practice and Post-structuralist Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), p.2.
Paul, op.cit., p.149.
Helen Waite Papashilvy, All the Happy Endings: a study of the domestic novel in America, the women who wrote it, the women who read it, in the nineteenth century (New York: Harper, 1956), p.xvii.
Nancy F. Cott, op.cit.
Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction, op.cit.
Jane Tompkins, op.cit., p.162.
Mary Jacobus, ‘Review of The Madwoman in the Attic’, Signs vol. 6 no. 3 (1981) quoted in
ed. Marlene Kadar, Essays on Life Writing: From Genre to Critical Practice (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), p.165.
Vita Fortunati, Introduction to Representations of the Self in Women’s Autobiography, ed. Vita Fortunati and Gabriella Morisco, (Bologna, University of Bologna Press, 1993), p.xv.
Francoise Lionnet, Autobiographical Voices: Race, Gender, Self-Portraiture (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), p.92
Shoshana Felman, ‘Re-reading Femininity’, Yale French Studies, 62, 1981, pp.19–44; Writing and Madness (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978).
Elaine Showalter, ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’, in ed. Elaine Showalter, The New Feminist Criticism (London: Virago Press, 1986), pp.243–70.
Cathy N. Davidson, ‘Mothers and Daughters in the Fiction of the New Republic’, in The Lost Tradition: Mothers and Daughters in Literature, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and E.M. Broner, (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980).
Annette Kofodny’ Dancing through the Mineheld: some observations on the theory, practice and politics of a feminist literary criticism’, Feminist Studies 6 (1980), reprinted in ed. Elaine Showalter, op.cit., p.161.
Susan K. Harris, 19th-Century American Women’s Novels: Interpretive Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
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© 1995 Shirley Foster and Judy Simons
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Foster, S., Simons, J. (1995). Introduction. In: What Katy Read. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23933-7_1
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