Juliana Horatia Ewing's 'Six to Sixteen,' 'Jackanapes,' and 'Mary's Meadow,' a critical edition

Juliana Horatia Ewing (1841-1885) was an extremely popular and respected writer in Victorian England, publishing extensively from the early 1860's until her death in 1885 at the early age of 43. Throughout her nearly quarter century of writing, Ewing produced an immense variety, of work, from fantasies to bildungsromans, from ghost stories to tragic tales of soldiers. She was among the first authors of children's literature to cross genre boundaries as well, composing poems, short stories, and novels. This edition demonstrates the diversity of her writing and spans eleven years of her career. It includes the domestic bildungsroman Six to Sixteen (1872), a girls memoir of her life from the ages of six to sixteen; the soldier story "Jackanapes" (1879), Ewing's most popular story; and "Mary's Meadow" (1883) a tale of a child's game of gardening, the hobby in which Ewing found the most joy. Explanatory footnotes and a critical introduction, as well as information on Ewing's life and her place in the history of children's literature, have been added to give modern readers the knowledge needed to understand these works. The introduction particularly focuses on the way she represents imperialism, class, and racial difference, as well as her use of nostalgia to portray the past, both the historical past and one's childhood, as a simpler and more blissful era, and on the ways in which Ewing draws on her own life to do so.