the beginning of a period of self-delusion or an end of one. Afterward, I still identified with girls in books, but things were different. And surely part of what I love about childhood literary heroines is the way they remind me of that bygone stretch of real innocence—the ability to experience myself however I wanted to; the long heavenly summers spent reading books on the floor, trapped in a slice of burning Texas daylight; the time when I, already a complicated female character, wouldn’t hear the phrase “complicated female character” for years. Those girls are all so brave, where adult heroines are all so bitter, and I so strongly dislike what has become clear since childhood: the facts of visibility and exclusion in these stories, and the way bravery and bitterness get so concentrated in literature, for women, because there’s not enough space for them in the real world.
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The draw of children’s literature may lie in the language as much as anything. These books have a total limpidity—a close, clean material attention that makes you feel like you’re reading a catalog description of a world to be entered at will. The stylistic combination of economy and indulgence accrues into something addictive, a cognitive equivalent of salty and sweet: think of Laura Ingalls’s pioneer snow globe full of calico and petticoats, horses and cornfields; the butter mold with a strawberry pattern, the maple-syrup candy, the hair ribbons, the corncob doll, the pig’s tail. We remember her childhood possessions and mishaps as well as, if not better than, our own.
Every book has its own palette. Betsy-Tacy and Tib (1941) opens with this description from Maud Hart Lovelace: “It was June, and the world smelled like roses. The sunshine was like powdered gold over the grassy hillside.” As Betsy and Tacy get older, the series revisits a set of motifs: cups of cocoa, piano sing-alongs, school orations, mock weddings. For Anne of Green Gables (1908), it’s bluebells and cordial and slates and puffed sleeves. Objects and settings are especially inextricable from plot and character. One of my favorite opening paragraphs in any novel is in E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967):
Claudia knew that she could never pull off the old-fashioned kind of running away. That is, running away in the heat of anger with a knapsack on her back. She didn’t like discomfort; even picnics were untidy and inconvenient: all those insects and the sun melting the icing on the cupcakes. Therefore, she decided that her leaving home would not be just running from somewhere but would be running to somewhere. To a large place, a comfortable place, an indoor place, and preferably a beautiful place. And that’s why she decided upon the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
We know everything we need to know about twelve-year-old Claudia from this accumulation of nouns: no to the insects and the sun and the cupcake icing; yes to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Off Claudia goes, with little brother Jamie and his “boodle” of change, stuffing their clothes in their band-instrument cases and getting on a train to New York City, where they take up residence among the treasures of the Met.
One of the best things about From the Mixed-Up Files is that our protagonists don’t get scared during their adventure. They don’t even miss home. Childhood heroines aren’t always fearless, but they are intrinsically resilient. The stories are episodic rather than accumulative, and so sadness and fear are rooms to be passed through, existing alongside mishap and indulgence and joy. Mandy, the protagonist of the 1971 novel by the same name, written by Julie Andrews Edwards—her married name, long after The Sound of Music—is a neglected Irish orphan, frequently overwhelmed by loneliness, who nonetheless possesses a native sense of hope and adventure. Francie Nolan of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) gets flashed by a predator, watches her father drink himself to death, and is almost always hungry. Her life is a stretch of devastating disappointments studded with moments of wonder—and yet Francie remains solid, tenacious, herself. Is that fantastical, the idea of a selfhood undiminished by circumstance? Is it incomplete, naïve? In children’s literature, young female characters are self-evidently important, and their traumas, whatever they may be, are secondary. In adult fiction, if a girl is important to the narrative, trauma often comes first. Girls are raped, over and over, to drive the narrative of adult fiction—as in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita