‘Real Childhood’: The Daring of Katherine Mansfield and Alice Meynell

In ‘Real Children’ and other essays in The Children and Childhood, the influential critic and poet Alice Meynell stresses aspects of the child that Katherine Mansfield brings to life in fiction: the child’s distinctive sense of time and close relation to nature; the child’s desire for dominance and awareness of death. Mansfield was well-acquainted with Meynell’s family, and the like-mindedness of Mansfield and Meynell is striking in the way they both feature challenging aspects of children. Both writers reject the Victorian dichotomy of innocent, precious children vs. ‘bad,’ obstreperous ones, a moralizing paradigm designed to make adults comfortable. They replace the model with a daring modern stress on the independence and force of the child’s mind.