Alice to the Lighthouse: Children's Books and Radical Experiments in Art

Alice to the Lighthouse is the first and only full-length study of the relation between children's literature and writing for adults. Lewis Carroll's Alice books created a revolution in writing for and about children which had repercussions not only for subsequent children's writers--Stevenson, Kipling, Nesbit, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Mark Twain--but for Virginia Woolf and her generation. Virginia Woolf's celebration of writing as play rather than preaching is the twin of the Post-Impressionist art championed by Roger Fry. Juliet Dusinberre connects books for children in the late nineteenth century with developments in education and psychology, all of which feed into the modernism of the early 20th century.