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Alice to the Lighthouse

Children’s Books and Radical Experiments in Art

  • Book
  • © 1999

Overview

Authors:
  1. Juliet Dusinberre

    1. Girton College, Cambridge, UK

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xxi
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  2. Children’s Books, Childhood and Modernism

    • Juliet Dusinberre
    Pages 1-40

  3. The Voice of the Author

    • Juliet Dusinberre
    Pages 41-68

  4. Virginia Woolf and the Irreverent Generation

    • Juliet Dusinberre
    Pages 69-110

  5. Death

    • Juliet Dusinberre
    Pages 111-150

  6. The Medium of Art

    • Juliet Dusinberre
    Pages 151-186

  7. Making Space for a Child

    • Juliet Dusinberre
    Pages 187-219

  8. The Literary and the Literal

    • Juliet Dusinberre
    Pages 220-278

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 279-352
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Keywords

About this book

Alice to the Lighthouse is the first and only full-length study of the relation between children's literature and writing for adults. Lewis Carroll's Alice books created a revolution in writing for and about children which had repercussions not only for subsequent children's writers - such as Stevenson, Kipling, Nesbit, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Mark Twain - but for Virginia Woolf and her generation. Virginia Woolf's celebration of writing as play rather than preaching is the twin of the Post-Impressionist art championed by Roger Fry. Dusinberre connects books for children in the late nineteenth century with developments in education and psychology, all of which feed into the modernism of the early twentieth century.

Reviews

'Each reader is likely to find some favourite writer here set in a new perspective. . . .especially persuasive in her treatment of Stevenson, whose ideas on aesthetics, when cross-cut with those of Fry and Woolf, seem freshly modern. . . here beautifully explored. . . .Alice to the Lighthouse engaged me more than any critical book I have read for a long time.' - Susan R. Gannon, Children's Literature Association Quarterly

'The central thesis of Juliet Dusinberre's engaging and beautifully written book is that many ... of the mould-breaking discoveries of modernism can be traced back to the artist's childhood experiences and insights. The exemplary modernist is Virginia Woolf, and the exemplary children's book is Alice in Wonderland... She makes out a splendid case with grace and wit and a commendable refusal of literary jargon.' - Andrew Davies, The Listener

'Wonderfully skilful and insightful study....Dusinberre deals as ably with Willa Cather as she does with Virginia Woolf, with Mark Twain as well as Lewis Carroll. Alice to the Lighthouse is an extraordinary book, learned and provocative.' - Regina Barreca, PMLA Annual of Children's Literature

Authors and Affiliations

  • Girton College, Cambridge, UK

    Juliet Dusinberre

About the author

JULIET DUSINBERRE is M. C. Bradbrook Fellow in English at Girton College, Cambridge, and is the author of Virginia Woolf's Renaissance: Woman Reader or Common Reader? and of the pioneering work, Shakespeare and the Nature of Women (2nd edition). She is now editing As You Like It for Arden 3.

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