{"id":6746,"date":"2024-12-02T16:03:59","date_gmt":"2024-12-02T06:03:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/veritysparks.com\/?p=6746"},"modified":"2024-12-02T16:03:59","modified_gmt":"2024-12-02T06:03:59","slug":"the-haunted-wood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/?p=6746","title":{"rendered":"THE HAUNTED WOOD"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The idea that children’s writing is a lower form – a\u00a0 brain-injured version of writing for adults, as<\/em> (writer Martin Amis) Amis caricatured it – is as persistent as it is misguided. Children’s literature isn’t a defective and frivolous sidebar to the grown-up sort. It is a platform on which everything else is built. It’s through what we read as children that we imbibe our first understanding of what it is to inhabit a fictional world, how words and sentences carry a style and tone of voice, how a narrator can reveal or occlude the minds of others, and how we learn to anticipate with excitement or dread what’s round the corner. What we read in childhood stays with us.<\/em><\/p>\n

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When I first read a review of Sam Leith’s The Haunted Wood<\/em> in the Guardian’s book pages, I practically drooled (sorry, but you know…book hunger). I knew I would love it. And I did.<\/p>\n

In the foreword, Leith lays out his ambitions for the book – in the role of a literary historian, to discuss the books and writers he thinks are important. He does so much more, though; he treats children’s literature seriously. I don’t mean solemnly; Leith doesn’t write as an academic, and the book is wide-ranging, lively and often funny. I loved that he gets just how important books can be to a child, how they can help make your world. And I loved how he digs into the often complex and troubled lives of some of the most influential writers – like JM Barrie, Kenneth Grahame, Frances Hodgson Burnett – to make sense of their work.<\/p>\n

The most effective writers for children almost always seem to be the ones who have the most invested in it emotionally. Often, they are writing from a wound – whether a wound sustained in childhood, or the wound of having had to leave it behind in the first place.<\/em><\/p>\n

If you accept that it deals almost exclusively with British writers (and Leith explains why; he thinks what he calls the British canon has had an outsized influence on the world), it could become a standard text. I could have used it when I was studying for my Graduate Diploma in Children’s Literature. Its great strength – which is that Leith writes about his chosen authors and their work in depth – could also be seen as a weakness, because he’s had to leave out so many (and some of them are my favourites, too*).\u00a0 But at 578 pages, The Haunted Wood<\/em> is still a weighty tome. I’m both a reader and a writer of children’s books, so this was a long, luxurious wallow in a subject I love.<\/p>\n

*Joan Aiken, for instance. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase<\/em> was one of the pivotal books of my childhood – I nearly wore it out! – and as an adult, it’s informed my writing for children. And then there’s Penelope Lively, William Mayne, Leon Garfield, John Masefield, Dodie Smith, Mary Norton…<\/p>\n

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The idea that children’s writing is a lower form – a\u00a0 brain-injured version of writing for adults, as (writer Martin Amis) Amis caricatured it – is as persistent as it is misguided. Children’s literature isn’t a defective and frivolous sidebar … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6746"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6746\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6751,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6746\/revisions\/6751"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/veritysparks.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}