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Children's Reading and the Culture of Girlhood: The Case of L.T. Meade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Sally Mitchell
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Extract

By the beginning of World War I, a separate culture of girlhood had taken shape in Britain. “Girlhood” had its own interests, values, and (perhaps) ethics; its own language, customs, and literature. Fifty years earlier, when publishers first began to identify readers in a category which they differentiated from the adult audience on the one hand and the general children's audience on the other, they were not quite sure who girls were and what they might be interested in. Publishers' advertisements used terms such as “the girl from 8 to 18” and “those who have left the schoolroom but not yet entered society.” The earliest girls' magazines, which appeared in the last quarter of the century, opened their readers' contribution pages to “girls” up to the age of twenty-five. Mid-nineteenth-century fiction about girls generally emphasized home life and home duties, but by 1900 many books dwelt on the values and interactions of girls themselves, with hardly any mention of adults. As a first step in discussing the creation of girlhood – and the values, attitudes, and understandings which this creation encoded – the case of L.T. Meade is instructive.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 17 , Spring 1989 , pp. 53 - 63
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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