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

[callmemadam]

That's a really interesting review. It may be an Edwardian book but its themes were still being used fifty years later. 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.

*Dick and Mollie Bettany in the CS series are a good example. They don't see their children for *years* while the children long to see them (why?). One should remember it did really happen e.g. to Kipling, so the authors were not just being melodramatic.

[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