(1955), or V. C. Andrews’s My Sweet Audrina (1982), or John Grisham’s A Time to Kill (1989), or Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991), or Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), or Stephen King’s The Green Mile (1996), or Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001), or Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002), or Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! (2011), or Gabriel Tallent’s My Absolute Darling (2017).
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We like our young heroines, feel as close to them as if they’d been our best friends. Plenty of these girls are sweet, self-aware, conventionally likable. But we like them even when they’re not. Ramona Quimby, from Beverly Cleary’s Beezus and Ramona series, is most frequently—even in the title of one of the books—described as a pest. In Ramona and Her Mother (1979) she squeezes an entire tube of toothpaste into the sink just to see what it feels like. In Ramona Forever (1984) she “began to dread being good because being good was boring.” Harriet, from Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy (1964), is an irritable, awkward Upper East Side gossip with a superiority complex. She slaps one of her classmates when she’s caught spying; she observes, about one of her teachers, “Miss Elson is one of those people you don’t bother to think about twice.” But we love her because she is prickly and off-putting. When she asks her friend Sport what he’s going to be when he grows up, she barely listens to his answer. “Well, I’m going to be a writer,” she says. “And when I say that’s a mountain, that’s a mountain.”
Many childhood heroines are little writers, perceptive and verbose. (They are often younger versions of their authors, whether literally, as in the Little House series, or in essence, as in Betsy-Tacy or Little Women.) Lucy Maud Montgomery introduces eleven-year-old Anne Shirley—who later starts a short-story club with her girlfriends—through a series of run-on monologues: “How do you know but that it hurts a geranium’s feelings just to be called a geranium and nothing else? You wouldn’t like to be called nothing but a woman all the time. Yes, I shall call it Bonny. I named that cherry tree outside my bedroom window this morning. I called it Snow Queen because it was so white. Of course, it won’t always be in blossom, but one can imagine that it is, can’t one?” Montgomery’s other writer heroine is the slightly goth Emily Starr, of the Emily of New Moon series, who explains, at age thirteen, that she intends to become famous and rich through her writing—and that even if she couldn’t, she would still write. “I’ve just got to,” she says. When she’s struck by creative inspiration, she calls it “the flash.”
In Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik (1979), the first book in the series, ten-year-old Anastasia—eager, neurotic, incredibly funny—is given an assignment to write a poem. Words start “appearing in her own head, floating there and arranging themselves into groups, into lines, into poems. There were so many poems being born in Anastasia’s head that she ran all the way home from school to find a private place to write them down.” She spends eight nights writing and revising. At school, a classmate recites a poem that begins, “I have a dog whose name is Spot / He likes to eat and drink a lot.” He gets an A. Then Anastasia reads hers:
hush hush the sea-soft night is aswim
with wrinklesquirm creatures
listen (!)
to them move smooth in the moistly dark
here in the whisperwarm wet
Her real bitch of a teacher, confused at the lack of a rhyme scheme, gives her an F. (Later that night, her father, Myron, a poet himself, changes the big red F to “Fabulous.”)
Betsy Ray is another writer, an unusual type—happy, popular, and easygoing. At twelve, she spends her time sitting in a maple tree, her “private office,” writing stories and poems. Maud Hart Lovelace modeled Betsy after herself, just as Jo March, the paradigmatic childhood writer-heroine, is a stand-in for Louisa May Alcott. In Little Women (1869), Jo writes plays for her sisters to act in, sits by the window for hours reading and eating apples, and edits the newspaper that she and her sisters produce with Laurie, which is called The Pickwick Portfolio. She “did not think herself a genius by any means,” writes Alcott, “but when the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather.” Arguably, the book’s biggest conflict comes when Amy burns