The Women Who Invented Twentieth-Century Children's Literature by Elizabeth West (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Women Who Invented Twentieth-Century Children's Literature by Elizabeth West Yuanyuan Zhang and Haifeng Hui The Women Who Invented Twentieth-Century Children's Literature. By Elizabeth West. London: Routledge. 2022. vii+ 260 pp. £120 (ebk £36.99). ISBN 978–1–032308–27–2 (ebk 978–1–003306–87–0). For children's literature, the decades from the 1930s to the 1960s are traditionally dismissed as the mundane 'Brass Age' (p. 4), overshadowed by the Golden Ages preceding and succeeding this period. In this book, however, Elizabeth West conducts an insightful reinvestigation of this period and testifies to its significant impact on modern children's literature. West concentrates particularly on the 'forgotten' (p. 1) dedication of a group of female writers, illustrators, editors, and librarians, or, in her collective term, the 'bookwomen', active in Britain and the United States between the 1930s and the 1960s. Their commitment to ensuring the quality of children's books in terms of both content and material form not only aided the production of classics still warmly received today, but also laid the foundation for some of the most crucial criteria for children's publishing, and 'invented', as the title of the book suggests, children's literature in the twentieth century. West resurrects the contributions of these bookwomen in an ambitious total of nine chapters. In the Introduction she explains her research focus and presents the principal preoccupations in children's literature and inter-war socio-cultural frameworks that form the basis for her subsequent chapters. In Chapter 1 the author gives a comprehensive overview of the representative British and American bookwomen and their interconnections. Chapters 2–7 each focus on a different aspect of children's literature or on a specific genre, featuring one or several bookwomen relevant to each topic. Chapter 2 concerns children's editors, highlighting the work of Eleanor Graham, the prominent founding editor of Penguin's Puffin [End Page 593] books. Chapter 3 uses Eileen Colwell's librarianship at Hendon Public Library to discuss the evolving role of children's librarians. Chapter 4 concentrates on how female children's authors managed to shine in the inter-war period by examining the successful career of Ursula Moray Williams, who managed to combine her writing talent with sound commercial sense so as to maintain long-lasting popularity. Chapter 5 centres on materiality and how bookwomen collaborated to negotiate content, design, wartime shortages, and commercial considerations of cost and profit. Chapter 6 examines picture books, concentrating on Kathleen Hale and her enduring Orlando series. Chapter 7 explores radical children's literature and records Amabel Williams-Ellis's efforts in embedding unconventional ideas in her works for the young. In the concluding chapter, West once again lauds the undervalued endeavour of the bookwomen. West's enquiry brings to light a largely neglected legacy. The bookwomen's accomplishments, including but not limited to seeking out space within a male- dominated industry that prioritized adult literature, exploiting innovative channels to promote children's literature, and, most notably, striving in a unified' (p. 245) way to define and create good books for children, paved the way for future bookwomen and prepared children's literature for its resurgence after i960, leading eventually to its overall visibility as a distinct literary branch. West also uncovers the extraordinary versatility or 'holistic approach' (p. 14) of these professionals, as many would engage in a book's entire lifespan from 'first inspiration to design, print, and production' (p. 209). That most of them had to juggle work and family and cope with wartime difficulties makes their achievements even more formidable. The book's voluminous scope encompasses the most important disciplines and key themes and concerns of children's literature and exhibits a mixture of research methods such as archival research, cultural studies, and textual analysis. Another major strength of this monograph is West's reference to a varied corpus of evidence, ranging from bookwomen's speeches, remarks, correspondence, writings, memoirs, biographies, interviews, to publishing, sales, and book-prize statistics. On the one hand, these findings, gathered meticulously by the author from varied sources including the British Publishing Archive and a number of university archival collections, corroborate West...