The most remarkable part of Lena’s story as a demonstration of the power of dialogue is the last quarter, where four characters respond to a traumatic event. This section, beginning with the “No!” spoken by the narrator and continuing to the end, depends heavily on dialogue. It could almost be a play. Notice that, although the lines spoken by Sandy, Carrie, Mom, the narrator, and Mrs. Hall are often very short, we get a clear sense of how each character differs from the others and how they relate to each other as family, friends, and neighbors. This is accomplished through the narrative that accompanies the dialogue.
Stone Soup Editors' Notes
Juvenilia: an introduction via Jane Austen, the Brontës and others
Juvenilia is the name given to creative work produced by recognized authors and artists when they were children and young adults. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was a fruitful time for juvenilia, especially that of writers. Jane Austen, the Brontë family, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, amongst others, among others, wrote extensively when they were young. Many of their manuscripts have survived, and a few are available on the Internet. The childhood and adolescent creative work of authors who became famous provides interesting comparison with the work of children and students we know in our lives. As editors of Stone Soup we have published extraordinary work by young writers, work that compares favorably with the best juvenilia. What makes writers, though, is not what they write as children and teenagers, but that they keep on telling stories throughout their lives. The juvenilia you will find on the Internet, in your local libraries and in the creative work publish in the pages of Stone Soup will provide entertainment for yourself, for your children, and for your students. And remember, after getting lost in the world of Jane Austen and the Brontë family, come back to us for the latest and most wonderful work by young people, being written today! To get you started on your journey through juvenilia, we have pulled together some links for you below. If you are interested in the original manuscripts, many of them tiny, handmade and handwritten books belonging to the authors, the British Library web pages have some excellent images and short articles of and about them. Jane Austen (1775-1817) Love and Freindship [sic], circa 1786, age 11 (see also our post on the 2016 movie by Whit Stillman with the same name, but actually based on a later novel, Lady Susan) Frederick and Elfrida, circa 1788, age 12-14 The Three Sisters, circa 1790, age 15-16 You can read more about Jane Austen’s juvenilia, and see images of some of her original hand-written notebooks, at the British Library website. Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855), Emily Brontë (1818-1848), Ann Brontë (1820-1849), (and Bramwell Brontë, 1817-1848) The young sisters and their brother created entire imaginary worlds–such as Emily’s Gondal and Bramwell’s Angria– which they wrote about prolifically in their youth, and produced tiny handwritten newspapers and magazines for themselves. The Brontë Sisters Web by Mitsuharu Matsuoka More links from Great Britain about the Brontës There are notes about and images of the Brontës’ notebooks, and an interesting video of a discussion about the Brontës’ juvenilia (in which experts handle the tiny original materials), at the British Library website. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) Poems written around 1843, age 14-15
Young Writers of the past: The Young Visiters [sic], or Mr. Salteena’s Plan (1919) by Daisy Ashford, age 8-9
The Young Visiters sold 300,000 copies in 1919! And that was just in Britain! The introduction to The Young Visiters was written by J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan. In Britain, The Young Visiters was published by the prestigious house of Chatto and Windus; in the U.S. by George H. Doran. The book was published without corrections for spelling or punctuation. The first third of the twentieth century was a period of great ferment in the arts. This is the time when the arts became more abstract, this including painting, sculpture, music and the literary arts as well. Many of the period’s finest writers, particularly in Europe, began complex literary experiments, including jettisoning standard grammatical forms and typographic conventions: The Death of Vergil by the German author Hermann Broch, Finnegan’s Wake by the Irish author James Joyce, and The Sound and the Fury by the American writer William Faulkner are classic examples of authors stretching the limits of standard grammatical form. Publishing children’s writing without corrections in 1919 spoke, not to indulgence or a lapse in standards, but to a courageous look at the achievements of naïve artists, of artists working without a full complement of technical skills, but with something to say and the will to say it. When we published Crippled Detectives by Lee Tandy Schwartzman in 1978, it was no longer possible, if one wanted the work to be taken seriously, to publish a child’s manuscript virtually as is. Or at least so it seemed to us then, and still does today. We standardize spelling and punctuation in Stone Soup (and did so in Crippled Detectives), although we do leave grammatical innovations, as we did in the work we published by Huong Nguyen. As you read The Young Visiters, you will find yourself immersed in the world of popular romantic fiction of the first decades of this century. Re-reading The Young Visiters makes me feel much more tolerant of student writing that is heavily influenced by mass culture. It reminds me that we learn by copying; that the desire, and then the will to carry through with the desire to tell a story is the true underpinning that makes all great artists great. The rest of us are those who have made a list of great titles for our books, but haven’t been able to make the books to go along with them! We at Stone Soup hope that you enjoy The Young Visiters. It makes a good story to read aloud, as it’s lots of fun for everybody. Contents Preface by J. M. Barrie 1. Quite a Young Girl 2. Starting Gaily 3. The First Evening 4. Mr. Salteenas Plan 5. The Crystal Palace 6. High Life 7. Bernards Idear 8. A Gay Call 9. A Proposale 10. Preparing for the Fray 11. The Wedding 12. How It Ended Preface by J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan The “owner of the copyright” guarantees that “The Young Visiters” is the unaided effort in fiction of an authoress of nine years. “Effort,” however, is an absurd word to use, as you may see by studying the triumphant countenance of the child herself, which is here reproduced as frontispiece to her sublime work. This is no portrait of a writer who had to burn the oil at midnight (indeed there is documentary evidence that she was hauled off to bed every evening at six): it has an air of careless power; there is a complacency about it that by the severe might perhaps be called smugness. It needed no effort for that face to knock off a masterpiece. It probably represents precisely how she looked when she finished a chapter. When she was actually at work I think the expression was more solemn, with the tongue firmly clenched between the teeth; an unholy rapture showing as she drew near her love chapter. Fellow-craftsmen will see that she is looking forward to this chapter all the time. The manuscript is in pencil in a stout little note book (twopence), and there it has lain for years, for though the authoress was nine when she wrote it she is now a grown woman. It has lain, in lavender as it were, in the dumpy note book, waiting for a publisher to ride that way and rescue it; and here he is at last, not a bit afraid that to this age it may appear “Victorian.” Indeed if its pictures of High Life are accurate (as we cannot doubt, the authoress seems always so sure of her facts) they had a way of going on in those times which is really surprising. Even the grand historical figures were free and easy, such as King Edward, of whom we have perhaps the most human picture ever penned, as he appears at a levée “rather sumshiously,” in a “small but costly crown,” and afterwards slips away to tuck into ices. It would seem in particular that we are oddly wrong in our idea of the young Victorian lady as a person more shy and shrinking than the girl of to-day. The Ethel of this story is a fascinating creature who would have a good time wherever there were a few males, but no longer could she voyage through life quite so jollily without attracting the attention of the censorious. Chaperon seems to be one of the very few good words of which our authoress had never heard. The lady she had grown into, the “owner of the copyright” already referred to, gives me a few particulars of this child she used to be, and is evidently a little scared by her. We should probably all be a little scared (though proud) if that portrait was dumped down in front of us as ours, and we were asked to explain why we once thought so much of ourselves as that. Except for the smirk on her face, all I can learn of her now is that she was one of a small family
