Bronte for Kids

Abstract

In this essay I want to focus on a handful of novels that together comprise a curious subgenre: novels for children (and, in particular, novels for adolescent girls) in which the protagonists imagine themselves into the Brontes' lives and fi ctions: novels that appropriate the plots of Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The History of the Young Men, and novels which represent adolescence by inserting their juvenile heroes and heroines into the plots of the heavily-my- thologized biographies of Emily and Branwell. In looking back to the Brontes, these writers of twentieth-century children's novels fi nd ways to plot the pas- sage between childhood and maturity and strategies for narrating the force of an emerging sexuality. This essay, then, seeks to redefi ne the role and function of the quixotic in novels for children and young adults, and in redefi ning the quixotic, it also reveals the crucial role the Brontes' fi ctions (and the fi ctions we have made out of their lives) play in our twentieth and twenty-fi rst century understanding of adolescence and adolescent sexuality. In order to convey the conventions that order the subgenre we might call for Kids, I offer the following plot summaries. In Pauline Clarke's The Return of the Twelves (1962), eight-year-old Max Morley fi nds a set of wooden soldiers in the attic of the old house his family has just moved into. With the help of the parson who lives next door (who just happens to be what Max calls a Brontyfan), his mother (enough of a Brontyfan herself to have some Bronte juvenilia conveniently at hand), and his sister (who proclaims that Jane Eyre's the best book I've ever and wants to read it again as soon as she has fi nished it), Max learns that his soldiers are actually Branwell Bronte's: they are the toys whose exploits he and his sisters chronicled in The History of the Young Men (37). Of course, the other Kelly Hager is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Graduate Program in Gender/Cultural Studies at Simmons College, where she teaches courses in Victorian Literature, children's literature, cultural theory, and television studies. She has published essays on David Copperfi eld, The Old Curiosity Shop, and canon formation in children's literature, and she has recently completed a book manuscript on the failed-marriage plot in the Victorian novel entitled Dickens and the Rise of Divorce.