Juvenilia and juvenile writers

Sometimes categorized as “child authors” or “literary juvenilia,” juvenile writers and juvenilia have been important literary categories since the early nineteenth century. Noted juvenile writers include Thomas Chatterton, Henry Kirke White, and Marjory Fleming; Leigh Hunt, Robert Southey, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote as adults. The manuscript juvenilia of Jane Austen and the Brontës are well known. The child authors Daisy Ashford, Julia Cooley, Hilda Conkling, and Nathalia Crane exemplify young writers prominent after the Victorian period. Anne Frank and Malala Yousafzai have maintained a modern presence for the juvenile tradition. Literary scholarship has increasingly recovered other young writers. Attention to juvenilia and the published juvenile tradition refines historical comprehension regarding youth, expands understanding of topics such as “natural genius” by exposing youth's part in them, and extends literary history by deepening understanding of contemporareous authors’ reputations, audience reception, and related movements (Romanticism or the self‐taught and women's traditions) by which juvenile writing has been subsumed.