ESC: English Studies in Canada

Abstract:

Young writers, particularly girls, experience a special brand of surveillance by adult readers and mentors, who rule sexual matters out of bounds. The young writers themselves, however, are eager to write love stories and to explore sexuality. As budding professionals, the youthful Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and even nine-year-old Daisy Ashford boldly claimed this disputed territory, and found ways to circumvent the adult resistance to their representations of sexuality. The child writer, in fact, claims the whole of experience as her province.