Shifting back to and away from girlhood: magic changes in age in children’s fantasy novels by Diana Wynne Jones

The intersection of age and gender in children’s stories is perhaps most evident in coming-of-age narratives in which aging, and the ways in which aging affects gender, are usually seen as natural, if complicated, processes. In regard to coming-of-age, magic changes in age in fantastic stories – whether the result of a spell or a time-shift – are particularly interesting, because they disrupt the natural aging process and potentially offer critical perspectives on aged and gendered subjectivities. This paper examines age-shifting caused by fantastic time slips in two novels by Diana Wynne Jones, The Time of the Ghost (1981) and Hexwood (1993). The main concern of the paper is how the female protagonists’ gendered and aged subjectivities are constructed in the texts, with a particular focus on the representations of girlhood. Gender and age are examined both as embodied and performed by examining the ways in which the shifts back to and away from girlhood affect the protagonists’ subjective agency and their experiences of their gendered bodies at different ages.