What Maisie Knows: A Study of Childhood and Adolescence

Abstract

W HAT MAISIE KNOWS is a continuous process, not of moral growth or even of moral awareness; nor is it a process of intellectual development on any plane much higher than her environment or Mrs. Wix was capable of inducing;' nor is it a process of character development in the sense of fineness of perception or discrimination of values or the acquisition of virtue or even of empirical principles. Her education is neglected, and it may be said, except in the area I shall indicate, negligible. Mrs. Wix is incompetent and nearly illiterate, Miss Overmore too much concerned with becoming Mrs. Beale Farange and later as Mrs. Beale the paramour of Sir Claude, her father and her mother too much engrossed in other things. Never sent to school, she grows to adolescence in a nursery and in a set of circumstances that, being of one kind, keep her apart from the formal education of textbooks and schools and isolated in the cage of her own consciousness, insulated even from the companion-