LONG AGO WHEN I WAS YOUNG

Of particular interest to specialists in children's literature, this book, which is not without interest, really, hasn't much hope of gaining an audience beyond that small market. Its twelve chapters were first published serially as "My School Days" in The Girls' Own magazine. They are the recollections of an early Victorian childhood by the author of such eternal juvenile favorites as The Bastables and The Treasure Seekers. Uninhibited by the post-Freudian fears which cripple so many of today's would-be autobiographers, E. Nesbit reached back and shared the major personal traumas and minor universal miseries of a childhood tried by the schooling then in vogue and by her own thermodynamic imagination. That she was a close observer of herself and her own reactions, that she hung onto the feel of being a child better than most, and that she used her memories in writing for children will be obvious to those who know her work well. Neither bitter nor sentimental, her own memories illuminate her early years better than Anthea Bell's Walck monograph, the most recent of the studies of Nesbit.