But didn't she write horror, from time to time?
Elizabeth Bowen, cited in a post by
hunningham, was dismissive both of anything children might read, and anything that might be genre fiction:
They read as we all read when we were twelve; but unfortunately the magic has been adulterated; the dependence has become ignominious - it becomes an enormity, inside the full-sized body, to read without the brain. Now the stories they seek go on being children's stories, only with sex added to the formula; and somehow the addition queers everything. The readers, all the same, are the great malleable bulk, the majority, the greater public - hence bestsellers, with their partly artful, partly unconscious play on a magic that has gone stale. The only above-board grown-up children's stories are detective stories.
It seems to be implicit in her argument that what children read, 'as we all once read - because they must; without fiction, either life would be insufficient or the winds from the north would blow too cold', can't actually have any literary merit or engage the brain. It's very belittling to the literary tastes of the twelve-year-old, who may well, by that age, have preferences and be making judgements and able to recognise, without perhaps being able to articulate it fully, that Antonia Forest is in a different category from Angela Brazil.
(We must assume that even when convalescing from the flu, she was never to be found curled up in the windowseat with Little Women or other childhood classic.)
I am also intrigued by the way in which detective stories recurrently get this pass as genre literature which it is okay to admit to reading and even to be seen reading. Even if my own suspicion is that the 'damned ingenious puzzle' defence (it's cerebral, it's like a crossword puzzle, it's not about the sheer pleasure of story) is possibly even less sustainable than that of those women (cited I think in Radway's Reading the Romance) who defended their reading matter on the grounds that they were learning about Hystorye.
We also note that Bowen, at least in her short stories, felt free to play with horror/ghost motifs, but perhaps those got a pass too? - after all, high-lit tradition of ghost/spooky stories.
There's also a huge binary assumption that it's either/or, rather than both/and, trash vs quality fic.
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