DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Maidlin Bears the Torch" by Elsie Jeanette Dunkerley. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
In this book, Rosemary Auchmuty looks at school novels with popular female heroines, such as the Abbey Girl books and the Chalet School series. She questions their ability to portray strong, independent women, and asks why the female authors often resort to the conventions of society, marrying the characters off into a life of domesticity.
Essays on authors and poets in this volume represent some of the best-known writers of children's literature in the twentieth century. This period is marked by certain characteristics, such as stories of groups of children bonded together, the emergence of strong female protagonists, the "career books", and a consciously subdued presence of pain and suffering. Many of these works are valued for the window they provided upon a culture now gone
Girls' school stories are still dismissed by adult critics as less significant than boys' school stories, despite recent academic recognition of the importance of children's literature generally. This encyclopaedia helps to redress the balance with over 400 entries on girls' school story writers. There is an entry for every British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand author known to the editorial team who had published at least one full-length story between 1876 and 1999. In the introduction, Sue Sims provides an overview of the development of the girls' school story and the influence on the genre of key authors, works and publishers. Rosemary Auchmuty's analysis of the critical response which these works have received highlights the different reactions of those who work in the book world, feminist critics and fans of the stories. A huge amount of original research is evident in the detailed entries by Sue Sims, Hilary Clare and a number of invited contributors, all experts in their field. Readers will agree that this encyclopaedia demonstrates that as a body of work, girls' school stories have played an enormous part in women's history and the evolution of children's literature in general.
