Works of Mary Louisa Molesworth

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The Irrational Knot Annotated. Works of May Agnes Fleming: The Horror Beyond Life's Edge: The Shadow in the Moonlight and Other Stories. The Children of the Castle. That Girl in Black. The Little Old Portrait. Carrots - Just a Little Boy. The Palace in the Garden. The Adventures of Herr Baby. Us - An Old Fashioned Story. The Wood-Pigeons and Mary. Miss Mouse and Her Boys. The Boys and I. The Third Miss St Quentin. The Green Casket and other stories. Tell Me a Story. The Man with the Pan Pipes and other Stories. The House That Grew. A Tale of the French Revolution. How to write a great review.

The review must be at least 50 characters long. The title should be at least 4 characters long. Your display name should be at least 2 characters long. Its fusion of magic with the ever-popular story of family life was a combination particularly satisfying to the late Victorians with their love of cozy, domestic detail, and their vague yearning for some other dimension to existence—now more often represented by fairy-tale enchantment than by the religious element so important in children's literature a decade or two earlier.

The Cuckoo Clock and The Tapestry Room stand near the beginning of that long line of domestic fantasy that leads on to the novels of E. Nesbit and later to Mary Poppins and The Borrowers. Moles-worth admired Hans Christian Andersen , and when she praised his way of "gilding the commonest objects with the brightness of his loving and delicate and humorous fancy," she might have been describing her own methods with the cuckoo clock, which she too portrays in vivid, humorous, and loving detail.

Mary Louisa Molesworth was born in to Scottish parents of an upper-class but impoverished family. This background explains both the passionate, almost reverent regard for precious and beautiful things that illuminates many of her books, and the snobbery that occasionally mars them. She was brought up mainly in Manchester and at twenty-two married an Army officer, with whom she was not happy. After bearing five children, she separated from him and moved for a time to Normandy which provides the French background for The Tapestry Room , until success drew her back to London.

Her first adult novel was published in , under the name of Ennis Graham, but from on she devoted herself mainly to writing for children, publishing over one hundred books. The Cuckoo Clock , her last book to be signed Ennis Graham, and The Tapestry Room were two of her earliest stories and helped to establish the very substantial reputation she enjoyed in her day. Her books were received with such universal acclaim—adjectives such as charming, beautiful, delightful, were showered on her by reviewers—that it hardly comes as a surprise to find the poet Swinburne comparing her in with George Eliot.

Her last book appeared in ; she died in The Cuckoo Clock is one of Mrs. Molesworth's very best stories. The unfailing theme of a lonely little girl in a strange old-fashioned house is given vivid and evocative treatment and the plot has a well-rounded unity lacking in many of Mrs. The character of Griselda, a quiet, imaginative child who tries to be good but fails at times through boredom, is one of the charms of the book, and so equally is the cuckoo, pompous, self-assured, and condescending, an unmistakable ancestor of E.

The magic of familiar things, of supernatural adventures combined with plush armchairs and warm feathered mantles, gives the book its delightfully cozy atmosphere. By contrast The Tapestry Room is chaotic, with many different ingredients thrown together. The story of the English boy going to live with his French relations provides a kind of framework into which are untidily thrust first a romantic, supernatural adventure with a tapestry castle, a rainbow forest, and a dying swan, then a version of the Scottish fairy tale of the Brown Bull of Norrowa, and finally a simple family story set around the French Revolution.

But despite its flawed structure, there are reasons for reading The Tapestry Room. There is the brilliantly evoked atmosphere of the high-walled, snow-bound house, real and solid as Mrs. Molesworth's houses nearly always are. Then there are the well-drawn characters of the two children, portrayed in some delightful nursery scenes—practical, motherly Jeanne and dreamy, chivalrous Hugh—given a fairy-tale idealization in Walter Crane's drawings.

Lastly there is Dudu the raven, chillingly introduced as an "ogre fairy" and a "wicked enchanter," a splendidly sarcastic, enigmatic creature with a Carrollian habit of snubbing his young companions. From the hotchpotch of the story these creations emerge with the force and humor of Mrs. Molesworth at her best.

Molesworth's own description of "Forget-me-not-land" in The Children of the Castle may be taken as an extension and elaboration of Charlotte Yonge's reaction: Molesworth seems to be subscribing to the Platonic theory of archetypes: These two books were not Mrs. Molesworth's first adventures into a magic land, nor yet her last: But the two books now set before us stand quite apart from all the rest. In the others the wonders are those of a magic world or of traditional fairylands: Molesworth stands midway between George MacDonald and C.

Molesworth's stories, and particularly the second, take a definite step forward in the direction that C. Lewis was to explore so fully in his chronicles of Narnia. When the Princess says to Mavis: If she could she would feel as you," it might almost be Aslan who is speaking; and the moments of wonder and delight, as when Cousin Hortensia sees the Princess in the Turret Room, are authentic moments of that "Joy" which Lewis sought in vain to describe.

Lewis wrote of MacDonald that "the quality which had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live," and that same quality shines faintly but clearly through these two tales. For, indeed, all three authors are glimpsing the same "elusive Form which once seen must inevitably be desired with all but sensuous desire" and trying to share that glimpse with their readers. Lewis describes this art as mythopoeic rather than literary, and for moments in both stories Mrs.

Molesworth achieves a new myth as surely, though not always as clearly, as MacDonald does in The Princess and Curdie. These two tales are all the more curious and interesting because Mrs. Molesworth seems never to have attempted precisely the same kind of myth-making in anything else that she wrote. She was the author of a hundred books, two booklets, a few uncollected short stories, and a few sets of verses.

Apart from a dozen or so adult novels, she wrote many directed at teenage girls, all now very definitely "dated," and many stories of younger children, the best of which achieve a very high degree of excellence and deserve to be remembered. The best known, such as The Cuckoo Clock and The Tapestry Room, are tales of fantasy mingling with real life; the rest are stories—miniature novels—of child-life ranging from small children in Carrots and Two Little Waifs, through older children in such books as Nurse Heatherdale's Story and Peterkin, to stories of children on the edge of adolescence such as My New Home and The Carved Lions, which is certainly the best of all her "real-life" stories and itself touches the numinous for a moment in Geraldine's dream.

The background of her life is very simple. She left Holland at the age of two, but her very earliest recollection was of a furious but exciting storm of wind—perhaps one of those which guided Gratian in Four Winds Farm. After this she lived in Manchester, the family moving, as their fortunes improved, from "a dull house in a dull street" to a more salubrious suburb, and finally into the country. She married Major Richard Moles-worth in , and they had seven children, two of whom died young. By the marriage had broken down, largely because of Major Molesworth's growing mental instability—the result of a head wound received in the Crimean War —and they separated, but did not divorce.

After some years in France, Mrs. Molesworth brought her children back to England to be educated, and she lived in London for the rest of her life. Her first literary ventures—four three-volume novels—had little success, but Tell Me a Story , Carrots , and The Cuckoo Clock established her suddenly among the most popular writers of children's books in that golden age in which her contemporaries included Lewis Carroll and George MacDonald, Mrs. While she was earning money for her children's education she wrote as many as six books in a year; but this did not seem to mar the excellence of her best stories, which appeared for Christmas every year from to over the Macmillan imprint, illustrated by the most famous illustrators of the day—Walter Crane for the first sixteen, and later such well-known artists as Leslie Brooke, Hugh Thomson, and H.

It is amusing to note that The Children of the Castle was so called by a mistake on Walter Crane's part: Molesworth's own title had been The Princess with the Forget-me-not Eyes! She continued writing, though producing fewer and fewer books, until her hundredth, Fairies Afield, in , but lived until 20 July Bowling Green , Ohio: In discussing the use of fantasy and fairy tale in children's novels at the end of the nineteenth century, Jack Zipes argues that many of the important writers such as Julia Horatia Ewing, Mary Louisa Moles-worth, and Edith Nesbit, adopted an essentially traditionalist approach.

Their imaginative world could be called exercises in complicity with the traditional opponents of fairy tales, for there is rarely a hint of social criticism and subversion in their works. After a brief period of disturbance, the fairies, brownies, elves or other extraordinary creatures generally enable the protagonists to integrate themselves into a prescribed social order. In an article on Edith Nesbit, U. Knoepflmacher seconds Zipes's argument, stating that for Victorian women writers such as Ewing, Molesworth and Nesbit, "fantasy serves an ideology that remains essentially anti-fantastic" Although Zipes and Knoepflmacher agree that the above women writers appropriated what appear to be subversive fairy tale and fantasy motifs, nevertheless, in Knoepflmacher's words, their work "neither radically challenges a patriarchal order nor sharply departs from pronounced moralism" Neither Zipes nor Knoepflmacher depart from a widely held critical consensus about nineteenth-century writers, and especially women writers for children.

With few exceptions, critics have argued that nineteenth-century women writers did not seriously question the bourgeois ideology of the fixed and static nuclear family. As Jane Rendall states, central to this ideology is the "concept of the desirability of the private and domesticated family world, apart from the public world of the economic and political marketplace" Nor did nineteenth-century writers, argue the critics, cast doubt upon the "doctrine" of separate spheres which underpinned the nuclear family, with its restrictive views of men's and women's roles.

According to the doctrine of separate spheres, women were to play a passive, subordinate and domestic role. Men, by contrast, were to play a more public, active, superior and controlling role. As some critics argue, this familial ideology was difficult, almost impossible, to challenge.

In Women and Fiction, Patricia Stubbs observes that it was dangerous for a writer to question the stable image of the inviolate, idealized nuclear family with its inflexible roles for men and women. A writer who did so would be censored and silenced by "publishers, editors or librarians. If a novel violated social and sexual conventions it was not just frowned upon or ignored. Society operated an extensive apparatus for banning and it did not hesitate to use it. This meant that if they wanted to be published at all, writers had to accept severe restrictions on the scope and treatment of their material.

Critics have agreed that writers of children's books could seldom if ever be exceptions to this general rule. If women writers for children appeared to deconstruct the rigorously conventional image of the nuclear family, they invariably reaffirmed or reinstated it by the conclusion of the novel.

The status quo thus remained essentially intact. I wish to argue that, in contrast to this critical consensus, at least one late nineteenth-century children's writer, Mary Louisa Molesworth, does not merely reinstate traditional paradigms of social order. Instead, she questions the status quo by destabilizing and subverting the rigorously paternalistic image of the nuclear family. Molesworth, well known at her death in as the writer of over volumes for children, often depicts a traditional family structure that has been altered by various social, economic, and other factors.

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Parents are often in foreign countries, the army, or dead. In The Cuckoo Clock , Griselda is sent to live with her great aunts after her mother's death, and in The Tapestry Room , the protagonist's family takes in an orphaned relative. Although the family at first "breaks down" in some of her plots, it appears by the novel's end to be reconstituted according to the "old" order.

This reconstitution might lead the reader to see her as merely reaffirming this social order. But this is not the case. The nuclear family with its prescriptive roles only appears to be reconstructed along conventional lines. Molesworth's The Palace in the Garden is a case in point. By the conclusion of the novel, the family is restored; but the customary patterns and roles have been so altered and modified as to constitute an almost new reality. The newly structured family is analogous, but certainly not identical, to the conventional nuclear family. Molesworth does not openly defy convention in The Palace in the Garden.

Instead, she subverts it by indirection. The expected members of the nuclear family are present: But they either no longer play the expected roles, or their conventional roles have been modified in significant ways. The aging grandfather—an upper middle-class, stereotypical family patriarch and member of parliament—is transformed from a distant, benevolent authority figure into a man who learns to express the genuine affection he feels for his grandchildren.

The children's great aunt, who takes the place of the dead mother, is not at all conventional. She is the former family outcast, who has been rejected because she had disobeyed her parents. All of the family members have ostracized her, including her brother, the children's grandfather.

Mary Louisa Molesworth - Wikipedia

At best she is an unusual choice to assume the role of the absent mother. Since she has not played the restricted role mandated for women, her presence destabilizes the fixed view of the nuclear family. She has made decisions independent of fatherly and brotherly authority. The children are also exceptional. As orphans, they have far more scope for independence. Throughout the novel, they take the initiative rather than being passive, nurtured objects of cultural conditioning.

In one sense, rather than be "educated" by their elders, they become the "educators" of their elders. They ultimately play a significant role in facilitating the transformation of the family along unconventional lines. Not only is the family reconstituted along more flexible and dynamic lines, but it is transformed emotionally so that the sterility resulting from unexpressed, even repressed, affection is replaced by a vitality that grows from mutual expressions of love.

This salutary change can be described as a magical transformation, mediated through fantasy and fairy tale. Gussie, the narrator and one of the children, repeatedly insists on the commonsense reality of her account, presenting the impression that she is striving to provide a realistic narrative. But the reality or authenticity of the narrative that reflects her experience does not deny the ethos of fairy tale. Instead, fairy tale elements are metamorphosed and incorporated into the narrative so that the novel itself appears as a contemporary fairy tale complete with a series of traditional motifs, including the magical transformation of the family, and two fairy tale intercessors, who are the equivalent of the fairy godmother or magic mediator and who facilitate the transformation.

In Molesworth's novel, fairy tale is not seen as an infantile realm of fantasy which is displaced, as the child matures, by a world of experience based on the reality principle. Fairy tale does not give way to the dull quotidian of empirical reality. On the contrary, the realism of The Palace in the Garden in some ways serves as a mask for a literary fairy tale. Quite aware of the restrictions placed on late nineteenth-century novelists, particularly woman novelists, Molesworth has dressed her "fairy tale" in what appears to be the conventional garb of realism.

In her study Feminist Lives in Victorian England: Private Roles and Public Commitment, Philippa Levine notes that women who wished to make the case for unconventional views often tempered their position to avoid overt hostility and censorship. Molesworth takes a similar approach, subverting rather than openly defying convention. I do not wish to make the case that she is a feminist; however, I do wish to argue that she brings—in the guise of a children's story—an approach to the nuclear family that is hardly conventional.

The events of the narrative are deceptively commonplace, and when order is disrupted, its restoration gives the impression of a traditional reaffirmation. The locus of family structure and authority never appears to be ambiguous. From this perspective, Molesworth's novel seems to resolve itself on the reconstruction of the patriarchal family. The story turns on a mystery concerning a family member whose identity has literally been erased the grandfather has crossed out her name in one of the books they read as children and hints at the disruption of the family's unity and nurturing function.

But its ideology never appears to be put in question. When the three children protagonists—Gussie, the narrator; Tibs, her sister; and Gerald, their seven-year-old brother—are orphaned, the grandfather does not hesitate to assume what he sees as his responsibility as the head of the family. He says to the children, "what I do is no more than you have a right to" Munt, the old housekeeper at Rosebuds, the family's country cottage, tells the children that their grandfather could have done his duty differently; he could have sent them to a boarding school or entrusted them to the care of strangers, and thus have further disrupted the family.

Instead, he chose to re-open his London house in order to have them near him. Yet he remains emotionally distant from the children. At the opening of the novel, the grandfather is a typical, remote yet benevolent patriarchal head of family. He seldom visits the three children, and when he does, he treats them ironically and demonstrates no affection. The children, in turn, are not encouraged to show affection.

When the housekeeper, Mrs. Munt, explains that their grandfather does love them, but that his own troubles have caused him to withdraw into himself, Tib responds, "I wish he'd let us feel that he loves us, and then we would, indeed we would, love him" This lack of overt affection gives the children a sense of emotional abandonment. Part of this breakdown in the expression of affection and love, as Mrs. Munt explains and the children sense, arises from the absence of a woman in the family: As we see from the developments of the novel, this statement does not finally suggest that love and affection are somehow rooted in woman's "nature," but rather that these qualities, encouraged by woman, are at the source of healthy family life.

The nuclear family is thus depicted as incomplete. It lacks the nurturing care of a mother figure. The paternal values of duty, responsibility, authority, and even a kind of love are present, but the informing affection and felt love, cultivated by a mother figure, are absent.

And thus, the children feel unloved, resentful, and emotionally abandoned. While the formal order and structure of the patriarchal family remains intact, its emotional and spiritual substance is, if not vitiated, at least in abeyance. The narrative concludes with what appears to be a conventional restoration of the lost order: The reader is presented, upon closure, with a family made whole again. The entire narrative appears to have been designed specifically for the reaffirmation of the bourgeois nuclear family, and of its domestic ideal.

The conventional surface of the narrative appears to be further corroborated by a series of intertextual references in the form of books which the narrator mentions during the course of the novel. Many of these are moral tales and behavior books which would seem to confirm not only the conventionality of the author's narratorial intent but also the mode of moral realism that apparently triumphs over fantasy and fairy tale. The works are significant: Each of these texts reinforces what appears to be the didactic message of Molesworth's overt narrative.

Edgeworth's Parent's Assistant is a collection of tales that demonstrate the unhappy repercussions of lying, thieving, bad company, and idleness. Edgeworth also challenges the notion that fairy tale and fantasy play a positive role in children's education. In the introduction, she explicitly challenges Samuel Johnson 's views on children's proclivity for fairy tales, asking, "Why should the mind be filled with fantastic visions, instead of useful knowledge? Like Molesworth's novel, it features a family disrupted by the death of the parents.

The orphan, Fanny, learns her lesson on how to play the conventional domestic role; she discovers that "amiable manners and a well-regulated mind, are the only true valuable ornaments. The children's better-behaved elder brother, who had become a sailor, is wounded in action and comes home to die a holy death, piously exhorting the younger children to reform and become sober and truthful.

That is, it becomes a moral tale. As the above intertextual allusions seem to imply, the moral tale with its didacticism and exhortations to conventional patterns of behavior appears to inform Molesworth's novel. At times, the influence is explicit, as the narrator, Gussie, occasionally expatiates on the wickedness of lying, cruelty, and prying into the private matters of adults.

She also stresses the fact that while she is considered to be a "naughty" girl, her naughtiness is never cruel or harmful. And while the children undertake adventures without the knowledge either of the housekeeper or of the grandfather himself, they are well-behaved children, careful not to disobey the grandfather even indirectly. Thus, they obtain "permission" from the grandfather for exploring in the secret place behind the locked door in the high wall surrounding the cottage grounds.

But they do so, as the reader recognizes, while the grandfather is in a state of absentmindedness. On the surface, however, their lives are carefully regulated. For instance, they are forbidden to associate with the neighbors and are required to live in isolation from other families, an injunction which they do not understand but which they obey.

But this is on the surface of the narrative. In addition to the didactic books by Edgeworth, Hughes, and Sinclare, the narrator also refers to a different series of texts whose messages contrast sharply to the exhortations of the moral tales. While the moral tales appeared to corroborate conventional expectations, these other intertextual allusions point toward the subversive elements underlying the ostensibly unchallenged values of the narrative with its apparent return to patriarchal order.

Among these texts, Gussie emphasizes a series of books which feature the essentially subversive world of fantasy, wonder and fairy tale: Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne 's Wonder Book, "and best of all perhaps, the dearest little shabby, dumpy, dark-brown book of real old-fashioned fairy tales" 18 , which the "realistic" narrator intends to keep for her own children. The fact that the treasured book is worn from reading stresses the key function of such tales in the narrative.

As these intertextual references suggest, the didactic and conventional surface of the narrative hides a different series of values which counter rather than reaffirm the ideology of the bourgeois nuclear family. The intertextual references are the cues or signals provided by Molesworth to suggest her apparent conventional narrative is not all that it seems on the surface.

From the outset, Molesworth provides a series of hints that indicate an unconventional view of the family. Gussie as narrator plays a significant role in the indirect subversion of patriarchal norms. From the beginning of the novel, Molesworth problematizes the narrative by providing a naive child narrator, who presents an unusual and by nineteenth-century standards unconventional view of the bourgeois nuclear family. This unconventionality is corroborated by recent studies of how the nuclear family was viewed during the nineteenth century. In Beyond the Family, sociologist and cultural historian A.

Robertson argues that previous views of the nineteenth-century nuclear family were rigid and incomplete. Although the ideal of the nuclear family was promulgated as a doctrine and although nineteenth-century sociologists and historians alike argued that it was fixed and stable, the nuclear family was far more flexible and dynamic than critics and theorists have assumed.

According to Robertson, "static definitions" have prevented historians from seeing that reproduction, the central concern of the nuclear family, "concerns a continually changing ensemble of people" In other words, people, then as now, found ways to vary the family structure in order to accommodate the needs of the different persons who wanted to be part of it. Previous studies of the family were skewed by the fact that researchers relied on "a single informant," who was invariably the male "household head" Robertson This observation plays a key role in assessing the significance of Molesworth's child narrator.

In providing an alternative perspective of the nuclear family—that of the naive and unformed female child—Molesworth is able to present a far more dynamic and flexible view of the family than was conventionally possible. As Robertson notes, previous studies, even during the twentieth century, have frequently relied entirely on the male head of household, and thus on the male perspective, for information.

The result is an incomplete, unnecessarily static and even distorted view of the family. By presenting the narrative through the eyes of a female child, Molesworth provides what may be seen as corrective lenses, which allow a different view of the bourgeois family to come into focus. Throughout the novel the unconventional female view is sustained. This is so even when the first person narrative is suddenly destabilized and fragmented toward the conclusion of the novel, as different narrators are interposed to provide information for the same event.

It is noteworthy that none of these narratives is given from the perspective of the male head of household, namely the grandfather, even though he participates directly or indirectly in each of them. The child narrator as an unconventional informant presents an unusual, and potentially subversive perspective. The ability of the narrator to deconstruct—wittingly or unwittingly—conventionally held views of the family is further enhanced by the fact that she has been isolated from English society and from its conventions in a number of ways.

Born in Spain and orphaned at an early age, she has no memory of what a "real" family is supposed to be like. Living with her grandfather has kept her in artificial isolation from other families, as she repeatedly acknowledges in her narrative. Although she states that her ignorance is a gap in her knowledge, this ignorance actually plays a positive role.

Molesworth, Mary Louisa 1839-1921

It is the point of departure for conceiving the nuclear family in different and more dynamic terms. From the outset, for example, she does not perceive the grandfather's benevolent yet ironic and cold distance as normal. On the contrary, she perceives it as a lack, as a problem. She also connects it with the family mystery of the crossed out name that she and the children wish to resolve. She suspects that the answer to the family mystery will help to provide an answer to her grand-father's character, to his cold reserve and his distance.

And finally, in a rough parallel to Huck Finn, she comes to believe that good has come out of what would be seen, conventionally, as "naughty" or reprehensible behavior. As she comments in her childlike way:. And even the great thing I have to write about, the thing that put it into my head to write it at all, would never have come but for our being in a way naughty—that is very queer, isn't it? To think that good and nice things should sometimes come out of being naughty! Her entire narrative may thus be seen as a process of undermining the values of the patriarchal family.

The mystery itself concerns a lost family member, a woman named Regina, whose outcast state is symbolized by the erasure of her name in one of the books the children have found in their grandfather's house. The mystery begins to take shape when the children, still in the London house, find out that they are to holiday at Rosebuds, the family's country cottage previously unknown to them.

Gussie remembers that the name Rosebuds is written in one of grandfather's children's books, Ornaments Discovered, but she also remembers that, on the same page, another name has been scored out. On examining the book, the children discover that the scored out name is Regina, Tib's middle name. This clue to the mystery, however, puts them perilously close to what they consider their grandfather's "secrets," which they, as respectful and well-behaved children, cannot pry into.

Yet they cannot stop themselves from wondering what the mystery is or what it means. Only later does the reader recognize the hidden irony of the crossed out name in the context of Ornaments Discovered. The name is that of a rebellious woman, the grandfather's sister and the children's great aunt. He had erased his sister's name from a conduct book that had clearly "failed" in its mission to shape her into an obedient embodiment of the domestic ideal. Gussie herself is "naughty" and the resolution of the novel turns on what she considers "naughty.

The mystery of Regina's identity remains concealed from the children. The retrospective narrator, Gussie, knows who she is at the time of writing, but conceals her great aunt's identity from the reader, who is only informed of her real status as rebellious woman and family outcast at the conclusion of the novel. And although great aunt Regina does not actually appear until the close of the narrative, she is indirectly present throughout much of the novel, represented by an ancestral portrait of a young woman named Regina, and by her daughter, who is also named Regina.

Regina, the grandfather's sister, Regina the daughter, and Regina in the family portrait are linked not only because they bear the same name, but also because they have an uncanny physical resemblance to one another. Gussie's sister, Tib, whose middle name is Regina, also resembles the three women. The suggestive richness of this pattern of character quadruplets suggests the novel's attempt to demonstrate how varied individuals are accommodated to a single family. In particular, the multiplication of characters who appear to be identical implies that the family's identity and coherence seem to depend on the female line.

As we also discover, however, these women are all different, each independent and active in her own way: Through great aunt Regina's "representatives," the narrator is able to depict her in a positive light throughout much of the narrative, before the reader knows the truth about her being ostracized from the family. The children, not knowing who this mysterious figure is, cast her in the role of the princess in a fairy tale they have invented in order to account for circumstances they as yet do not understand.

The fairy tale fantasy, far from being inconsequential, actually helps them to reshape reality. Ultimately, the fairy tale projection of the positive figure of the princess, or the good fairy, succeeds in transforming adult reality itself. The outcast woman, whose representatives have been benevolent figures for the children, is in turn revealed to the grandfather as the figure the children have imagined. The fairy tale becomes reality. The children can imagine her as a nurturing figure because they do not know her status as an out-cast, a status that does not interfere with their acceptance of her as a magical intercessor and as a replacement for their lost mother.

For the children, there is no social or emotional barrier to her reintegration into the family, or with her assumption of the maternal role. Indeed, through the eyes of the children, and especially through the eyes of the child narrator, the grandfather's erasure of her name and his banning her, and her daughter, from the respectable territory of the family, appears unwarranted and over-reactive. The children's initiative to transform the family begins—outside of their awareness or intention—when they are moved to the family cottage, Rosebuds.

Rosebuds had already been associated with the mystery of the erased name. Gussie's response to this new place signals her recognition that, despite her prosaic tendencies, she has somehow entered into a fairy tale and fantasy realm. On the first morning, she lies in an uncustomarily meditative state between sleeping and waking—the romantic area of the mixed states of consciousness—which she sees in terms of fairy tale:.

Oh, it is too delicious—and when you hear all those sounds, as you are lying there still dreamy and sleepy, there is a sort of strangeness and fairyness —I must make up that word—that makes you think of Red Riding Hood setting off in the early morning to her grandmother's cottage, or of the little princess who went to live with the dwarfs to keep house for them.

While still in the London house, Gerald and Tibs, her brother and sister, had already indicated a similar recognition when they first heard of the country cottage. Resisting the idea of a fantasy world, Gerald complains: Picking up the reference to witches, Tib then adds: I do hope there'll be something interesting and out of the common there—something romantic " After their arrival at Rosebuds, as their initial responses have already suggested, the children continue their attempt to make sense of the family mystery by incorporating what they know into a fairy tale or fantasy narrative.

While playing in the cottage garden, in order to assuage their curiosity about the family mystery, into which they, as good, obedient children, cannot pry, Tib suggests that they fantasize about it, that they "turn it into a play. We can't leave off wondering, as you say, but we can mix up our wondering with fancy, and make up a plan of how it all was.

It will be very interesting, for we shall know there is something real, and yet we can make it more wonderful than anything real could be now that everything's grown so plain—and—I don't know the word—the opposite of poetry and fairy stories, I mean—in the world. In her narrative or "plan" to represent "how it all was," the romantic Tib recognizes that the fairies have been exiled from the world, that the world has become "prosaic," and so in her narrative, she, like Wordsworth, wants to surround the events of every day with an aura of imagination, thus giving it a sense of the wonderful and the extraordinary.

Author:Mary Louisa Molesworth

Gussie, though she thinks this a good idea, tells us, "I am not so fond of fancying or pretending as Tib—I like real things. And the idea of a real secret or mystery had taken hold of my mind, and I wanted to find out about it" Tib wants a story of ancient times or ogres, that is, a romance or fairy tale; Gussie wants a prosaic, realistic story of detection. And yet, in the final count, what Gussie tells is a story laced and under-pinned by fairy tale elements and motifs. The conflict between the two children and the two modes of perception dominates the attempt at narration and becomes a dialectic by which the children make sense of their growing but incomplete knowledge of the family mystery.

Once the children decide to act out their narrative, they must first construct a plot that will accommodate their knowledge and perceptions of the mystery. Tib, who "was all for a regular romance," proposes the initial plot in which "there was to be a beautiful lady shut up by a cruel baron, who wanted to get all her money by forcing her to marry his hump-backed son" A prince, of course, will rescue the lady. Since they are to act out the story, however, they run into several problems immediately. While there is a garden wall at Rosebuds, for example, it is too high for the children to climb, and so the lady's escape from the dungeon by going over the wall must be revised: Similar problems of production, casting and setting, cause the children to revise their initial concepts to suit the actual conditions they have found, much as the fairy tale mode itself is being revised to have a contemporary significance.

But they never lose sight of the essential motifs of the fairy tale. A new discovery appears to corroborate Gussie's insight that real mysteries are as exciting and interesting as invented ones, and just as surprising. Discovering a locked door in the garden wall and the key to open it, they believe that they will enter a toolhouse which they could use as a "dungeon" in their invented tale. What they find outstrips their imaginings. When they pass through the door, they are greeted by a "perfect flood of light. Had we chanced upon some such wonder of old world times as our little heads were stuffed with" Uncertain whether they are "awake or dreaming," they enter "the enchanted palace," and Tib exclaims, " what a bower for a princess!

Gussie makes one of her expected disclaimers at this point in an aside to the reader: It is not a fairy story for her, since it is not distant from the children or separated from reality by a clear barrier; instead, it is reality. But despite Gussie's objections, the alert reader notes that her account is suffused with the language, images, and motifs of a fairy tale, albeit transposed into contemporary terms. The children find themselves in a house that appears to be unlived in, since it looks deserted and dust covers hide the furniture.

And yet the place is obviously cared for. They enter what appears to be a conservatory. A second door leads to a hallway "which ends in a very large and handsome drawing room" The doorway leading out of the drawing room is locked, but on one wall they discover a life-sized portrait. Although painted in a different, much earlier age, the portrait—as already mentioned—bears an uncanny resemblance to Tib.

A further detail seems to connect the portrait to the family mystery: This un-usual discovery prompts the children to believe that they have entered an enchanted palace. Gerald declares, "Perhaps that lady is really alive, and the fairies have fastened her up into that picture till—till" The others find Gerald's inarticulateness amusing; yet in a sense his assessment proves to be accurate. Great aunt Regina, who resembles the picture, has indeed been banished by the grandfather—an act that has the equivalent effect of enchantment, since it prevents her from being part of the family and erects a "magical," i.

Tib immediately sees the portrait as the new basis for their fantasies, since the woman portrayed can become an enchanted princess. Gussie, by contrast, wishes to solve the mystery it presents. She indicates that this room is not part of an enchanted palace by making a practical move. Finding the key to the door leading into the drawing room, she hides it in a drawer, so that no one can return and lock the children out: Gussie proceeds like a detective, who wishes to find the real explanation for what only appears to be enchantment.

She recognizes that "the palace in the garden" is linked with the mystery surrounding the crossed out name; but she also understands that the grandfather must explain this to them voluntarily: Since the discovery of the portrait has given them a new tack, the children abandon their original plot: That is, by casting the princess in a maternal role, they have substituted an image closer to their true desire for that of the hackneyed romance.

At this point, the equivalent of the magical intercessor of fairy tale arrives in the person of Charles Truro. Charles, a cousin who is acting as a secretary to their grandfather, is kind and affectionate, an attentive listener who immediately wins their trust and confidence. They tell him the secret of their discovery in the garden, seeing him as "a sort of good fairy who was to put everything right" Without their knowledge, Charles intervenes. As the reader discovers later, he is not only the grandfather's secretary, but also the good friend of great aunt Regina and her daughter.

Thus, he knows the story of how the old man banished his sister for her disobeying their parents in her choice of a husband. Charles Truro and Regina devise a plan: Cousin Regina's entrance into the "old house" seems magical. The children recognize her arrival, almost instinctively, even before they see her. Gussie feels the difference in the room: The family resemblance between Regina and the life-sized portrait in the abandoned house is so striking that when Regina steps into the drawing room for the first time, the children almost believe she has stepped out of the portrait.

They accept her presence—her friendship, her kindness, her gifts, her entertainment—as if she were, indeed, a magical figure. When she leaves at the sound of a bell, Gussie comments, "Surely she must be a fairy of some kind, after all! When the children discuss the meeting later, the only way they can make sense of it is through fairy tale motifs. Gerald is convinced that "she is a fairy, and that she lives in Fairyland," and commenting on the summons by the bell, Tib responds, "That part of it was really like a fairy story" The practical, realityloving Gussie adds, "If only she had left a slipper behind her, it would have been a little like Cinderella… though the deserted, quiet room and that part of it, is more like the Sleeping Beauty" And then, remembering their first entrance through the garden wall, she adds, "And the first day, when we were trying to get in at the door in the wall, was like one of the stories of dwarfs and gnomes in the woods …" The conclusion of the tale is not an abandonment of fairy tale, but instead an incorporation of fairy tale into everyday reality.

The fairy tale which helped the children make sense of reality, now succeeds in reshaping reality. The transformation occurs through a series of improbable coincidences—the contemporary version of "magic"—to bring about the "happy ending. She solves this narrative problem by first stating her quandary and then by reporting a series of alternate perspectives that had been told to her later. The break-up of the narrative into multiple perspectives allows the reader to see that the transformation of the family is finally the work of many mediators, not just the children themselves.

In the first of many coincidences, which serve to bring about the denouement, the children break off the key to the garden and are locked in "the palace. He believes that they have drowned in the deep pools in an area outside the cottage. Suddenly, his emotions and his imagination are activated; he imagines that they are dead, and is so convinced that he orders the dragging of the pools to find their bodies.

This traumatic experience, living through what he believes to be the children's deaths, causes him to acknowledge and express his own emotions for the first time. And it causes him to recognize how much they mean to him. Thus he becomes vulnerable and open to what now occurs. By a further coincidence, his servants, in order to borrow dragging hooks, go to the house where great aunt Regina and her daughter are living.

Regina's daughter immediately realizes that the children have not been drowned, but instead have been locked in the old house. She sends her mother, the family outcast, to the grandfather with the good news, while she goes to free the children from the locked up house. The grandfather is reconciled to his sister, whom he had adamantly refused to see for many years. A new family unit is now formed. Order appears to be restored, and the conclusion seems to re-affirm the normal status quo.

However, it is a much altered status quo, and a much more flexible and dynamic grouping than the "nuclear family" with its doctrine of separate spheres and its static, rigidly defined roles. Gerald, whose point of view is ostensibly dismissed by his two older sisters, is nonetheless accurate in his assessment: I do understand all I need … I understand that we've got an auntie, and that she's very kind, and that Regina is a cousin, and she's very nice too—so nice that I'm still going to think she's a fairy.

That's what I've settled, and I think it's quite enough when only seven. As Gussie tells us in the last sentences of the novel, the new family grouping has transformed their lives and has transformed the family itself from a sterile grouping of human beings connected by duty and blood ties, to a far more vital unit of people, inter-connected by strong and active emotional bonds: Grandpapa says he is getting very old but he really doesn't look so, and even when he does get 'very old,' we shall all only love him the better" The simplicity of the final statement, like the surface of the narrative itself, is deceptive.

Hidden in the ostensibly naive account written by a child, Molesworth has put into question the view of family which was officially promulgated throughout the nineteenth century. Instead of the domestic ideal of the obedient, passive Angel in the House, we have not one, but two mother figures: Regina, the rebellious woman, and her daughter, both of whom now act in place of the children's missing mother. Not only are these figures unconventional in themselves; they encourage nontraditional behavior on the part of Gussie. Cousin Regina helps the child, Gussie, to play what was, in the late nineteenth century, still an unconventional role: Gussie consciously speaks throughout the narrative about the act of writing, reminding the reader again and again that she is struggling with a difficult narrative, trying to find adequate words to express her point of view.

The difficulty lies not in the failure of the child narrator, but in the unusual nature of her task: As Gussie's act of writing underlines, the literary heritage plays an important role throughout the novel. The children are always reading and referring to texts. When they first see great aunt Regina through the garden wall, she is reading rather than fulfilling the expected feminine activities of sewing and doing domestic work. While both of the mother figures and the children themselves play unconventional roles in this family of articulate women, the family structure is also modified by the revised roles of the other characters.

The grandfather is no longer the distant family patriarch, but a loving man who is close to his grandchildren, a metamorphosis that is remarkable given the requirements of the patriarchal role. The family is not limited to the mothers, father and children, but is extended to include Charles Truro. It is thus depicted as an open-ended, dynamic and inclusive structure, in which none of the members play a fully conventional role. As Robertson suggests, the nuclear family was, in reality, probably far more flexible and changing than the officially sanctioned paradigm would lead us to believe.

Molesworth has thus provided not only a subversive, but perhaps a more accurate, picture of the realities of the bourgeois family than the various regulatory discourses of the nineteenth century would seem to permit. Molesworth's subtle critique of mainstream values is of particular significance in the context of children's literature as a marginal or inconsequential literary genre.

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In her discussion of nineteenth-century women artists, Anne Higonnet speaks of the difficulties women faced in charting their careers in territories traditionally reserved for men. Women, Higonnet argues, frequently negotiated positions not in mainstream endeavors, but in areas that were considered to be on the margins of the public artistic and literary domain. According to Higonnet, "Liminal careers provided women with uncharted terrain to claim as their own" , and as an example, Higonnet points to the illustration of children's books as one of these "unclaimed" territories.

Women who specialized in "unusual or marginal" genres, she argues, "could go far without seeming to break any rules" Moles-worth, who specialized in what appears to be an inconsequential genre, that of children's books, charts precisely such a terrain. And in making this genre her own, she gently questions traditional roles in which women are relegated to the nonpublic, domestic sphere. In terms of the Victorian nuclear family, The Palace in the Garden does not merely effect a simple reconciliation with the status quo to "enable the protagonists to integrate themselves into a prescribed social order," a reconciliation that "neither challenges a patriarchal order nor sharply departs from a pronounced moralism.

The fairy tale intertext thus becomes an especially appropriate medium for this kind of subversion, since the fairy tale's primary concern has frequently been to find a mode of transformation that can accommodate and reconcile new realities. And so, though the family seems to look like it always did, it has retained its integrity and stability by being transformed. A careful reading of Molesworth's book reveals that our current assumptions about the Victorian family are probably too narrow and formulaic to describe the vitality with which individuals adjusted the family structure to meet the changing needs of everyday life.

It is scarcely surprising, then, to find that her novels—ostensibly straightforward, charming stories, with everyday plots and characters, written by and for children—should actually contain a different, subversive message beneath the tranquil surface of conventionality. Auerbach, Nina, and U.

Fairytales and Fantasies by Victorian Women Writers. U of Chicago P, Emerging Feminism from Revolution to World War. Genevieve Fraisse and Michelle Perrot. Belknap P of Harvard U, Nesbit and the Reclamation of the Fairy Tale. Feminist Lives in Victorian England: Private Roles and Public Commitment.

The Palace in the Garden. Women in an Industrializing Society: Reynolds, Kimberly, and Nicola Humble. New York UP, The Social Organization of Reproduction. U of California P, Feminism and the Novel, Harper and Row, The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves. Work Ethic Conflicts and Conundrums in Mrs. Molesworth's Books for Girls. A profession, a trade, a necessary occupation, something to fill all my faculties, I have long felt essential to me, I have always longed for.

But why, oh my God, cannot I be satisfied with the life which satisfies so many people? Why am I starving, desperate, diseased on it? Florence Nightingale , private note c. There is a restless desire to "do good," which leads many to look abroad into the wide field of misery, and to overlook the opportunities of usefulness which lie at their own threshold … Lavish upon your home affection, attention, unselfishness, and banish from it every morbid feeling, all craving for excitement, remembering always that.

Molesworth embodies all the conundrums of the Victorian work ethic. By the time she died in , she had written over one hundred books and had been acclaimed as the most popular and successful children's writer of her day. But principally she wrote to earn money. Separated from her husband, Mrs. Molesworth was the sole breadwinner for herself and their five children.

She liked to live well, and managed to have a fashionable social life, and to house, clothe and launch her family in style by working furiously. Throughout her career, from until , she published several books every year, as well as countless articles and poems; she wrote long after she said she was too old or too ill to write. She wanted to "sell well, even after I am dead"; anything, anything to earn more money. Yet her books spell out a work message of caution and restraint. Even though her heroines, like their creator, long for work, she never lets them emulate her own success and independence in the workplace.

These heroines, unmarried and in their twenties, live under the parental roof. They know their ambition ought to be confined to the domestic sphere, but their longing for a different kind of fulfillment becomes a struggle between convention and new goals for women.

Molesworth's life and books are a useful springboard from which to examine the female work ethic, first because of the contrast between her experience and her message, and second because the books themselves sympathetically unpack the anomalous Victorian attitude towards women's work. The books highlight the paradoxes implicit in middle-class Victorian values.

Molesworth analyzes each conflicting norm in the plight of late nineteenth-century middle-class girls—the appeal of work, the dangers of lack of occupation, the statistical "surplus" of girls that made earning a necessity, 2 the need to keep caste and the duty to honor the feminine code. This essay intends to show how the Victorian female work ethic is a maze of contradiction and confusion in which noblesse oblige, ambition and penury are equally significant. Molesworth, a polite, though academically archaic, form of address.

Molesworth, Mary Louisa (1839–1921)

I believe that individuals from another age can only be judged fairly, not by our own experiences, but by our efforts in understanding the codes and the tenets of their time. This usage underlines and pays tribute to Mrs. Molesworth's respect for convention. In this she typified her class and age. She was firmly middle-class, every inch a lady, and wrote about respectable middle-class families. She believed in social progress, in which talent could break through humble beginnings, but she was also a stickler for tradition and etiquette as the safeguards of advancement.

In another conundrum, the Victorians believed in social change, while simultaneously passionately upholding rules of class. To refer to a woman by her surname was not done, unless she was a criminal, tart, lunatic or servant, as in Arnold's acid instance: Molesworth, in searching for a path through her labyrinth of orthodox and radical beliefs, was in the end guided by behavior.

The sobriquet "Molesworth" would have been, to her, outrageous. Molesworth's double standards of work and womanliness were an echo of Queen Victoria's position. The highest figure in the land was a symbol of all the inconsistencies of the age to which she gave her name. She combined might and femininity, strength and submission, prepotency and dependence.