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A Girl Called Tennyson
Joan Givner, A Girl Called Tennyson (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Thistledown Press, 2010), pp. 260, $12.95 CDN, ISBN: 978-1-897235-83-6.
This is a marvellously literary book, written by a former university English professor, which contains echoes and resonances of George Macdonald, Rudyard Kipling, Bulwer Lytton (The Coming Race) and, a more recent influence, Philip Pullman. Its achievement is that it contrives, without compromising its literariness, to appeal to a modern Young Adult audience. The author is adept at grabbing the reader's attention with an arresting first sentence: 'The ferry had moved some distance away from the dock before Tenn noticed anything strange'. She also prepares cleverly for a possible sequel with an open-ended final sentence in which the heroine dreams 'of walking back into her own house, and introducing Una to her family and her world.' In between is a classic rite of passage story, in which the heroine, Anne Tennyson Miller, the 'girl called Tennyson', slips from her own well-realised contemporary world into 'Greensward', a parallel universe in which there is a 'Great Dearth' of children and in which families are made up of 'borners' (birth parents) and 'dopters' (adopters), in order to share the children around. The rules of this world are clearly set out to appeal to a young readership: at a council meeting, every teenage child must announce the name they have chosen to be known by in their future adult life. There is danger from wicked kidnappers and a perilous Pied Piper-like journey in which the heroine has to guide a group of rescued children through a series of perilous encounters with snakes, wolves and quicksands.
Behind all the action is Tennyson's poetry. The heroine gains acceptance in her new home by retelling stories from the Idylls of the King, beginning with 'The Lady of Shalott' and moving on, through 'Lancelot and Elaine', to 'The Passing of Arthur'. Story-telling is presented as the way to find one's own true identity. Una becomes herself by composing and reciting 'The Song of Tennyson's Journey', describing the daring adventures of her friend. 'The Lotos- Eaters', of course, looms large, as the heroine struggles with the inclination not to return to her own world. Frequent quotations from the poems engage and challenge the teenage reader.
This book, as well as being a delightful read in itself, provides yet another example of a strange and, as far as I know, little-explored literary phenomenon: the impact of Tennyson's poetry on North American girlhood. This can be traced to the beginning of the twentieth century, but it announced itself most clearly in 1925, with the publication of Anne of Green Gables by another Canadian author, L.M.Montgomery. The University of Prince Edward Island, where the novels are set, now has a School of Montgomery Studies and runs a biennial conference at which the influence of Tennyson seems ripe for discussion. The Green Gables novels are full of Tennysonian quotations and even Tennysonian events, a climactic scene being the near-drowning of the heroine as she attempts to 'float down to Camelot' upon a 'barge' which springs a leak, and has to be rescued, to her chagrin, by the young hero, Gilbert Blythe.
However, the imaginative power of Tennyson's poetry is presented as having to overcome what is done to it in schools. Montgomery provides a telling insight into 1920s educational methods:
They had studied Tennyson's poem in school the preceding winter, the Superintendent of Education having prescribed it in the English course for the Prince Edward Island Schools. They had analysed and parsed it and torn it to pieces in general until it was a wonder there was any meaning at all left in it for them, but at least the fair lily maid and Lancelot and Guinevere and King Arthur had become very real people to them. (Anne of Green Gables London: George Harrap, [1925] 1953, 186).
The tension between the harsh adult world of 'parsing' and the dreamy, numinous world of Anne herself is redolent of the latter-day Romanticism of North American cultural life in the early years of the twentieth century. Montgomery's belief in 'Imagination' is positively Coleridgean. Anne may be gently ironised, but her values have her author's full support. Characters are judged by whether they are 'kindred spirits.' Landscape is mystical and richly personified: there are 'books in the running brooks'. The Anne-books succeed largely because of this supreme confidence in their underlying Romantic philosophy, with Tennyson its moving spirit, interpreted entirely in terms of his Romanticism. It is heartening that, through Joan Givner, Tennyson's influence, albeit purely as a Romantic poet, seems likely to reach another generation of Canadian children, and similarly disheartening that no British children's writer has so far appeared who is equally steeped in his work.
Valerie Purton
Volume 9 Number 5
This is a marvellously literary book, written by a former university English professor, which contains echoes and resonances of George Macdonald, Rudyard Kipling, Bulwer Lytton (The Coming Race) and, a more recent influence, Philip Pullman. Its achievement is that it contrives, without compromising its literariness, to appeal to a modern Young Adult audience. The author is adept at grabbing the reader's attention with an arresting first sentence: 'The ferry had moved some distance away from the dock before Tenn noticed anything strange'. She also prepares cleverly for a possible sequel with an open-ended final sentence in which the heroine dreams 'of walking back into her own house, and introducing Una to her family and her world.' In between is a classic rite of passage story, in which the heroine, Anne Tennyson Miller, the 'girl called Tennyson', slips from her own well-realised contemporary world into 'Greensward', a parallel universe in which there is a 'Great Dearth' of children and in which families are made up of 'borners' (birth parents) and 'dopters' (adopters), in order to share the children around. The rules of this world are clearly set out to appeal to a young readership: at a council meeting, every teenage child must announce the name they have chosen to be known by in their future adult life. There is danger from wicked kidnappers and a perilous Pied Piper-like journey in which the heroine has to guide a group of rescued children through a series of perilous encounters with snakes, wolves and quicksands.
Behind all the action is Tennyson's poetry. The heroine gains acceptance in her new home by retelling stories from the Idylls of the King, beginning with 'The Lady of Shalott' and moving on, through 'Lancelot and Elaine', to 'The Passing of Arthur'. Story-telling is presented as the way to find one's own true identity. Una becomes herself by composing and reciting 'The Song of Tennyson's Journey', describing the daring adventures of her friend. 'The Lotos- Eaters', of course, looms large, as the heroine struggles with the inclination not to return to her own world. Frequent quotations from the poems engage and challenge the teenage reader.
This book, as well as being a delightful read in itself, provides yet another example of a strange and, as far as I know, little-explored literary phenomenon: the impact of Tennyson's poetry on North American girlhood. This can be traced to the beginning of the twentieth century, but it announced itself most clearly in 1925, with the publication of Anne of Green Gables by another Canadian author, L.M.Montgomery. The University of Prince Edward Island, where the novels are set, now has a School of Montgomery Studies and runs a biennial conference at which the influence of Tennyson seems ripe for discussion. The Green Gables novels are full of Tennysonian quotations and even Tennysonian events, a climactic scene being the near-drowning of the heroine as she attempts to 'float down to Camelot' upon a 'barge' which springs a leak, and has to be rescued, to her chagrin, by the young hero, Gilbert Blythe.
However, the imaginative power of Tennyson's poetry is presented as having to overcome what is done to it in schools. Montgomery provides a telling insight into 1920s educational methods:
They had studied Tennyson's poem in school the preceding winter, the Superintendent of Education having prescribed it in the English course for the Prince Edward Island Schools. They had analysed and parsed it and torn it to pieces in general until it was a wonder there was any meaning at all left in it for them, but at least the fair lily maid and Lancelot and Guinevere and King Arthur had become very real people to them. (Anne of Green Gables London: George Harrap, [1925] 1953, 186).
The tension between the harsh adult world of 'parsing' and the dreamy, numinous world of Anne herself is redolent of the latter-day Romanticism of North American cultural life in the early years of the twentieth century. Montgomery's belief in 'Imagination' is positively Coleridgean. Anne may be gently ironised, but her values have her author's full support. Characters are judged by whether they are 'kindred spirits.' Landscape is mystical and richly personified: there are 'books in the running brooks'. The Anne-books succeed largely because of this supreme confidence in their underlying Romantic philosophy, with Tennyson its moving spirit, interpreted entirely in terms of his Romanticism. It is heartening that, through Joan Givner, Tennyson's influence, albeit purely as a Romantic poet, seems likely to reach another generation of Canadian children, and similarly disheartening that no British children's writer has so far appeared who is equally steeped in his work.
Valerie Purton
Volume 9 Number 5
Submitted on February 16, 2012 in By David.
