Writing, Reading and Collecting Girlhood: Maria Edgeworth in the Pollard Collection of Children's Books

Abstract

This thesis is a sustained examination of the Pollard Collection of Children's Books which uses girlhood as a framework within the Collection. It contextualises the author Maria Edgeworth, the most prolific writer in the Collection, within the scholarly understanding of children's literature. It presents ways to read and make meaning from the text, the book, and the collection, using children's literature criticism, book history, and collection theory, respectively. The first section connects Edgeworth's experience of girlhood with her signature girl characters. It explores the roles she played within the social structures of her family, position, class, and home. The section demonstrates that rather than needing to balance between daughter, teacher, eldest sister, and successful writer, Edgeworth embraces the nuanced experience of being all these things at once. Gubar's kinship model shows these roles exist in relation to one another not as binary opposites but as complements. The second section argues that the construction of girlhood in Edgeworth's books goes beyond the textual and to the material. Print culture, book history, and paratexts are tools that evaluate the components around the text added by printers and booksellers to send messages to girl readers, as Gérard Genette defines them: titles, tables of contents, prefaces, catalogues and frontispieces. The section concludes by arguing that girlhood is understood only by looking beyond Edgeworth's textual constructions to consider the materiality of her books, both as individuals and as part of a collection. The third section starts by focusing on Mary 'Paul' Pollard: her history and the amassing of her collection. The chapter situates Pollard in a tradition of female collectors and librarians who influenced canon formation and how Pollard subverted ideas of canon through her particular collecting habits. The concept of canon is probed in relation to Stimpson's paracanon, and I further the argument by introducing the concept of 'anti-canon' as defined by Pollard's collection of unknown and uninteresting books. The second chapter differentiates the Pollard Collection after it is bequeathed to Trinity when it has moved from personal to institutional, arguing these books derive meaning in relation to one another, echoing Douglas and Isherwood, and demonstrate how this collection of apparently insignificant books gains cultural capital simply by being given to Trinity College. In conclusion, the Pollard Collection establishes Edgeworth's work as -children's books,- so it is appropriate to read her work within this context and to identify her work as a progenitor of what later becomes Young Adult literature. Reading text, paratext, and collection hones our understanding of girlhood by drawing together methodologies from children's literature, book history, and collection studies. This thesis illuminates the Pollard Collection as a threshold into the past, into historical girlhood, into textual girlhood, into bibliographical girlhood, and into remembrance of personal girlhood. Finally, it considers how researchers add a new dimension to the understanding of girlhood and opens the potential for other meanings to be derived through further exploration of the Pollard Collection.