Children's susceptible minds : Alicia Lefanu and the "reasoned imagination" in Georgian children's literature

In her study of twentieth-century British children’s literature, Kath Filmer argues that fantasy literature very often takes on the task of creating stories by which “readers can tolerate self-knowledge.” The quietly subversive social and feminist messages that Lefanu encodes into her fairy tale narratives certainly appear to have been more difficult to voice within the strictures of the early nineteenth century’s didactic approach to children’s literature. Avoiding any excitement of the imagination, women’s rationalist children’s literature often bypasses the issue of a young girl’s marriage prospects and, in its duty to mimetic representation, focuses instead on empowering mother-daughter relations. The process of gaining the type of feminist self-knowledge which Lefanu encourages and facilitates in her writing for children becomes much more tolerable, however, through the medium of fantasy. This tendency in Lefanu’s writing is, perhaps, most explicit in The Flowers and in Almeria’s decision to remain in fairyland with Zelindor at the close of the poem. The revisionary implications of the two lovers’ union can only be expressed in this utopian fantasy world, and the suggestion remains that any return to the real world would potentially threaten this otherwise successful attempt to rupture conventional gender norms. Moreover, The Flowers and Rosara’s Chain explicitly demonstrate the crossover between didactic and imaginative styles of writing that challenge critical literary histories of the period. The sometimes vitriolic and unequivocal invectives of reviews, editorials, socio-political pamphleteering, and critical prefaces, are here moderated by the practical difficulties faced by the two differing ideological attitudes towards children’s literature and the desire from both sides to adhere to a style of literature that instructs as well as delights.