WOMEN WRITERS OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE

In the Women Writers of English and Their Works series, an entry that brings together 12 children's book (female) writers, most of them dead (Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Louise Fitzhugh, Kate Greenaway, E. Nesbit, L.M. Montgomery, Beatrix Potter, P.L. Travers, Laura Ingalls Wilder), but three who are most definitely not: Madeleine L'Engle, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Katherine Paterson. The critical extracts that Bloom (Vergil's Aeneid, 1996, etc.) brings together are difficult going even for well-read adults; what YAs may come away with—from Henry James's attacks on Alcott and Alison Lurie's retread of Greenaway as the lame boy the Pied Piper leaves behind—is the vast, consuming nature of literary criticism, its subjectivity, occasional forays into spite, and infrequent—incidental— illumination. Brief biographies (three or four paragraphs) provide background on each of the 12, while bibliographies of their works point the way to primary sources. The breadth of the 80+ articles included (from Anne Parrish on Greenaway in 1846 to articles on Wilder that have appeared in the last year) and their variety (Graham Green on Potter, Jonathan Cott on P.L. Travers, Paterson on Paterson) make the volume essential for the professional reading shelves; it may require some coaxing to get it into the hands of younger bibliophiles but will justify such coaxing amply. (Criticism. 14+)