REVIEW: On Windycross Moor

[feather_ghyll]

On Windycross Moor: Mabel Quiller-Couch. Collins, inscribed 1936

I probably wouldn’t have posted about this book, although it features a minor character with a remarkable name Angela Brazil would have envied, Thirza, if it hadn’t been a while since I posted a book review. I haven’t read a lot of girls own books recently.

This is about ‘early

Comments

[feather_ghyll]

I've no patience with these explorers/missionaries/empire builders who leave their children to be brought up by someone else. Why have them?* The new stepmother/father whom the poor girl is expected to love crops up pretty frequently, too.

I suppose the Empire building was at its apogee in the Edwardian era, so I knew I was reading it from a post-Colonialist slant. I appreciate that writers of children's literature find absent parents extremely useful, which is probably why this phenomenon remained popular in kidlit. I can see why it would be generally unthinkable for most children's authors in the early twentieth century to undermine real parents by criticising these parental figures or their actions. After all, it was for King and country! And although it was a real phenomenon, it wouldn't have been something the majority of the readers would have experienced. Or possibly the writers, so they didn't look too closely at the impact of this abandonment.

And while I agree with the prevailing view of most of the country that children to boarding school is abandonment too, I'll go along with pretending I think its as unproblematic as most writers of boarding school books do. But that mostly doesn't involve a distance of several thousands of miles and an absence for several years, though it was/is tied into the same British project for the middle/upper class.

I'm sure remarriages (more because of bereavement than divorce, as it is today, where children are linked to two households) was commoner, but mixing the two tropes meant that Jane was being told 'You must love your stepstrangers because I am always right.' Authors may acknowledge some of the children's emotional response, but they usually side with the parent an represses that perfectly valid response. It happens quite a lot in fiction and there must be a social/psychological reason for it, but yes, it's this insistence that they are Good Parents doing Good Parenting and the child who doesn't immediately fall in is being bad that sticks in myecraw. The Battanys are a good example of this.
s.