Louisa May Alcott was born into an unusual family and grew up near Boston. She was surrounded by stimulating people, conversations, ideas, and books—and also by impracticality. Her philosopher father was a dreamer who started a utopian communal farm called Fruitlands. The farm soon fell apart because its transcendental residents liked talking about their philosophies better than farm labor. In spite of her family’s hardships, Louisa found outlets for her creativity in writing stories, poems and plays, which she and her sisters presented. One of her greatest joys was taking nature walks with family friend and author Henry David Thoreau.
Louisa was practical as well as artistic. By the time she was seventeen, she had started to take responsibility for her family’s financial needs. She hired herself out as a reader to the elderly and ill, cared for little children, and did mending and laundry for other families. At the same time, she persevered in her effort to become a writer. When she was twenty her first poem appeared in a national magazine. Three years later her first book, Flower Fables, was published.
In 1862 Louisa served as a Civil War nurse in Washington, D.C. While there she became ill with typhoid fever, and the mercury-tainted medicine the doctors gave her damaged her health for the rest of her life. As soon as she regained enough strength, Louisa resumed her effort to make a living for her family with her pen. Her editor talked her into writing a girl’s story. Although Louisa thought the book might be too dull, she agreed. To her surprise Little Women was an immediate bestseller. Similar novels followed, all of them enjoying great success. Royalties from her books made it possible for Louisa to support her parents and her orphaned niece, who was like a daughter to her.
Hans Andersen, the son of a poor Danish washerwoman and a shoemaker, was often ridiculed and mistreated by his peers. His deep love of children and concern for their suffering is clear in his Fairy Tales. Although he loved books and the theater from childhood and dreamed of becoming famous, he was “the Ugly Duckling”—a failure in the trades his mother chose for him, and as an actor, singer, and dancer. His determination to make something of his life won him a sponsor and an education. He made a fairly successful beginning as a poet and novelist. Then in 1835 he wrote four short stories for the daughter of the secretary of the Academy of Art. The Ugly Duckling at last had become a Beautiful Swan.
In the next forty years, Andersen wrote more than 150 stories for children, and they have been translated into more than eighty languages. His early stories were based on old folktales, but around 1843 he began to create his own stories. His frequent travels, love of nature, memories of childhood, and everyday events became the “seeds” for his fairy tales. “They lay in my thoughts as a seed-corn,” he said, “requiring only a flowing stream, a ray of sunshine, a drop from the cup of bitterness, for them to spring forth and burst into bloom.”
Andersen’s Fairy Tales are considered to be among the most beautiful, sensitive, and powerful tales ever told. Fancy and reality blend in these stories, which include “The Little Match Girl,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Little Mermaid,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and his masterpiece, “The Snow Queen.” His tales contain sweetness and sadness, gravity and sunshine.
Born in County Donegal, Ireland to a village postmaster and his wife, Frances became blind at the age of eighteen months as a result of smallpox. She was one of twelve children, and her parents had no money for a private tutor. Frances learned by listening to her brothers and sisters as they repeated their lessons at home in the evenings. Since her family could not afford any books, kind people loaned books to the Browne children. Frances did her brothers’ and sisters’ chores so they would have time to read to her. Soon she also repaid them with entertaining stories of her own.
Frances started writing poetry when she was seven (dictating poems to family and friends). When she was about fifteen she heard some great classical poetry that made her believe her writing was worthless. She burned her poems and didn’t write again for almost ten years. Then she heard simple Irish poems that gave her new hope for her own writing. Soon magazines began to publish her poetry, and in 1844 a book-length collection of her poems was released. This volume earned her fame as “the blind poetess of Donegal” and a yearly pension of twenty pounds from a patron of the arts.
Frances used her earnings as a writer to help one of her sisters get an education. This sister then became Frances’s secretary and reader. The two women moved to Edinburgh, where Frances made just enough money to take care of them with a little left over for her mother in Ireland. She worked hard to earn a living, writing stories, essays, song lyrics, and reviews on assignment. In 1852 another distinguished patron of the arts gave her one hundred pounds. This allowed her to move to London and spend more time on the writing she most wanted to do. Of all she wrote, Granny’s Wonderful Chair is the one enduring favorite.
From early childhood and through her teens, Dinah Mulock had a difficult life. Her gifted minister father was mentally ill, often unreasonably stubborn and cruel, and unable to provide for his family. Dinah’s mother started a school in Newcastle as a source of income, and at age thirteen Dinah became her assistant. When her mother died in 1845, Dinah’s father deserted her and her two younger brothers. Dinah took up writing children’s books and then adult novels to support herself. Her brothers died tragically, one at sea in 1847 and the other after a long struggle with illness in 1863.
Tall and slender, full of energy, talent, and wit, Dinah enjoyed her life as an independent single woman and successful author. She turned her attention to writing and editing fantasy literature in 1850, and at the request of publisher Alexander Macmillan she compiled a collection of fairy tales, described by him as “the cream of the cream of Fairy lore.” In 1865 she married George Lillie Craik. Although George was a Scotsman, the couple made their home in London where he worked for Macmillan’s publishing house and Dinah wrote for children and adults. They adopted an abandoned baby girl and named her Dorothy, “the gift of God.”
Up until Dinah’s death she continued to write, producing twenty novels, a dozen children’s books, and hundreds of poems, short stories, and essays. She was a lifelong champion and friend of working women, a best-selling novelist, and admired by many of Britain’s most famous writers, including Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning. Her most enduring novel is The Little Lame Prince (1875).
When Annie was two years old, her father, a Methodist minister, died. The rest of her childhood was spent with her mother and two sisters on a farm near Evansville, Indiana. As a girl, Annie started writing poems and stories like the ones she read in magazines. Always an eager reader and student, she began teaching school when she was only seventeen. After a few years of teaching and work as a private secretary, Annie toured New England and Europe, and then came home to marry a widower with three children. William Johnston encouraged his wife’s interest in writing, and she sent her stories to various magazines. When he died in 1892, Annie was left to raise her stepchildren alone. That is when her serious career as a writer began. Her first book was published the next year.
In 1895 Annie and her children went to visit relatives in Pewee Valley, Kentucky. She fell in love with the relaxed, elegant style of Southern life. While she was there, she met a little girl who reminded her of an old-time Confederate colonel. When she returned to Evansville, she wrote The Little Colonel. It was so successful that she wrote twelve more books in what became a very popular series. In 1898 she moved to Pewee Valley, where she lived until her death, except for a few years in the West where she nursed her stepson through a terminal illness. In 1935 Annie’s best-known story came to the silver screen with Shirley Temple as the Little Colonel.
During Selma’s childhood in Varmland, a province of southern Sweden, she became enchanted by fairy tales, legends, and adventurous tales of her native land. She began writing poetry as a child. For ten years, she taught school in Landskrona, Sweden. In 1890 she won a Swedish newspaper literary contest for her first novel, which was published the next year. Her next book, a collection of short stories, was an immediate success. In 1895 she won a traveling scholarship and financial help from the Swedish Academy, which allowed her to become a full-time writer.
The National Teachers’ Associate of Sweden asked her to write a geographical reader about Sweden, and she spent three years studying the folklore and natural history of the provinces. This resulted in her internationally honored books titled The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906) and The Further Adventures of Nils (1907). In these stories she presents Sweden’s climate, landscape, wild creatures, people, and traditions through the experiences of young Nils, a farmer’s son. Nils is bad-tempered and unkind to animals. He becomes an elf who rides on the back of a wild goose and is soon enlightened. In Lagerlöf’s fantasy stories, good is seen triumphing over evil.
Lagerlöf is remembered as the foremost Swedish novelist of her time. Her novels and short stories show the strong influence of fairy tales and folklore on her creative imagination. In 1909 she was the first woman and the first Swede to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Tenderhearted and concerned with the welfare of others, just prior to World War II, she helped German artists and intellectuals escape to Sweden. Then, when Soviet Russia tried to take Finland, she donated her gold Nobel Prize medal to raise money toward Finland’s resistance.
Andrew Lang grew up in Scotland and graduated from St. Andrews University. Although he spent much of his adult life in England, his work reflected his love of Scotland. He was a brilliant scholar, historian, and expert in folklore. He believed that people around the world share certain basic human feelings, and he thought this explained why similar stories developed in very different cultures. To support his theory, he collected fairy tales from many lands and ethnic groups. Then he turned to Mrs. Lang and others who retold the stories for children. Thus, Lang actually served as editor for the series known as the Colour Fairy Books that bears his name. The first one was The Blue Fairy Book (1889), featuring tales from Grimm and Perrault, old chapbook stories, some selections from The Arabian Nights, some Scottish tales, and an abridged version of Gulliver’s Travels.
Lang wrote in the introduction to The Pink Fairy Book:
We see that black, white, and yellow people are fond of the same kind of adventures. Courage, youth, beauty, kindness, have many trials, but they always win the battle; while witches, giants, unfriendly cruel people, are on the losing side. So it ought to be, and so on the whole it is and will be; and that is the moral of all fairy tales.
His yearly color books, which ended in 1910 with The Lilac Fairy Book, branched out and included traditional folklore from all over the world. In addition to collecting fairy tales, Lang wrote several of his own. The best of them is The Gold of Fairnilee, based on the Scottish legends and ballads of his childhood.
Although George MacDonald was a minister plagued with poverty, illness, and bereavements, he was also a celebrated literary figure and public speaker. He was so spectacular on an 1872 lecture tour in the United States that he was offered the pastorate of a church on New York’s Fifth Avenue with a salary of twenty thousand dollars a year. Leading American authors eagerly befriended him.
MacDonald’s literary talent can’t compare with that of his friend Mark Twain, but his power of imagination makes him at least Twain’s equal. In 1873, Twain and his wife visited the MacDonalds in England. From 1876 to 1883 the two authors sometimes exchanged their works. Twain liked George MacDonald, and he and his daughter Susie loved MacDonald’s fantasy At the Back of the North Wind (1871).
One of MacDonald’s greatest gifts was his ability to gently draw his readers’ hearts toward God. His fantasies The Princess and the Goblin (1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1883) are a wonderful pair of stories for readers of any age. They are easy and exciting enough for children and wise enough for elderly professors. Twenty of MacDonald’s other stories are available in a two-volume set called The Gifts of the Child Christ: Fairy Tales and Stories for the Childlike (Eerdmans, 1973). The favorites in that set are “The Golden Key” and “The Light Princess.” MacDonald said, “For my part I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether five or fifty or seventy-five.”
MacDonald was good friends with Lewis Carroll, and Carroll sent his Alice in Wonderland manuscript to MacDonald to see how his family would like it. So MacDonald was the first parent in the world to read Alice to his children. (He had eleven children of his own and had adopted two more who needed a home.)
C. S. Lewis was strongly influenced by MacDonald’s writing. As a Christian he said that he owed more to MacDonald than any other single writer. In The Great Divorce, a short fantasy for adults, Lewis pictured himself meeting George MacDonald on the outskirts of heaven and telling the wise old man how his writing had led Lewis to Christianity.
British author Edith Nesbit knew both wealth and poverty. When she was young her widowed mother lost all her money, and later her husband lost his business capital because of a dishonest partner. She had to support the family herself, which she did in a variety of ways, including hand-coloring Christmas cards and, eventually, writing books for children.
The Treasure Seekers (1899) was her first book and the beginning of a series about the Bastable children. They dig for treasure, sell poems, serve as detectives, rescue a princess, and borrow money. The other two Bastable stories are The Wouldbegoods (1901) and New Treasure Seekers.
Nesbit wrote a second set of three books about a family of children who fall into fantastic adventures: Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906). C. S. Lewis mentioned the Bastables at the beginning of his own children’s book The Magician’s Nephew. He was particularly fond of The Story of the Amulet.
In 1998 Britain’s Royal Mail paid tribute to fantasy literature with a series of stamps entitled “Magical Worlds.” The stamps illustrate scenes from The Hobbit, Through the Looking-Glass, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and The Borrowers. In the brochure that accompanied the stamps, Nesbit is credited with opening up the way for real children to step effortlessly between their world and the world of fantasy.
Emilie grew up in Newark, New Jersey, the granddaughter of Norwegian and British grandparents. She had poor vision from the time she was a baby, so after finishing public school she enrolled in the famous Perkins Institution for the Blind in South Boston. She also trained to become a kindergarten and elementary-school teacher in Boston. From 1879 through 1882 she taught at the Perkins School. Then she became a private teacher, lecturer, writer, and, in 1897, editor of the Kindergarten Review. Her books include Nursery Finger Plays (1889), In the Child’s World (1893), Through the Farmyard Gate (1896), Child Stories and Rhymes (1898), Love and Law in Child Training (1899), Holiday Songs (1901), In the Child’s World (1919), and Finger Plays for Nursery and Kindergarten (1921). She also contributed many articles and poems to magazines, including Books are keys to wisdom’s treasures; Books are gates to lands of pleasure; and Books are friends. Come, let us read.
Katherine and her older brother Howard were the children of Quakers with deep roots in Delaware’s Brandywine Valley. Their parents encouraged their artistic nature by surrounding them with great literature and art. In 1876 Howard sold a story and illustrations about a magic pill to Scribner’s Monthly. Early the next year his first fairy tale sold to St. Nicholas Magazine, the leading children’s periodical. Soon he had an invitation to come to New York as a magazine illustrator. In New York City he became well known for his illustrations in Harper’s Weekly and other major magazines. But by 1879 he was tired of New York and decided to return to his Wilmington studio. After teaching art for several years at Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, Howard opened his own school of art in Wilmington in 1900.
Like her older brother Howard, Katherine Pyle showed an early interest in writing and drawing. Her first published poem appeared in Atlantic Monthly during her childhood. As a young woman, she was an art student of Howard’s at the Drexel Institute. For a few years she pursued her career in New York, where she wrote her first published book, The Counterpane Fairy (1898). Then, like Howard, she returned to Wilmington, where she spent the rest of her life.
In addition to writing and illustrating her own short stories, poems, and plays for children, she illustrated several books by other authors. Her projects included collections of fairy tales and legends. She believed these stories had tremendous value because they showed readers that eventually good always triumphs. Among her noteworthy books are The Christmas Angel (1900), Once Upon a Time in Delaware (1911), Tales of Wonder and Magic (1920), Tales from Greek Mythology (1928), and Charlemagne and His Knights (1932). She contributed poems and illustrations for the children’s classic The Wonder Clock: Or Four and Twenty Marvelous Tales (1887), a favorite for reading aloud.
Along with Katherine’s artistic pursuits, she became an advocate for juvenile offenders in Wilmington. She had a strong concern about social reform and gave generously to the needy.
Laura grew up in Boston, Massachusetts, the daughter of two famous Americans: Julia Ward Howe, who wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, founder of the Perkins School for the Blind. In 1871 she married an architect and industrialist, and the couple made their home in Gardiner, Maine. Like her parents, Laura spent much of her time trying to make her world a better place in which to live. When she wasn’t working to improve life in Gardiner, she was busy writing and raising her seven children.
Her poems for children seemed to, in her words, “bubble up from some spring of nonsense” deep within her. They kept bubbling from the publication of her first book in 1880 until her final anthology, Tirra Lira, in 1932. She also wrote short stories for her own children, which eventually appeared in books, and novels for girls. Her most successful children’s book was Captain January. She and her sister Maud Howe Elliott won the first Pulitzer Prize given to a biography for their two-volume biography of their mother, Julia Ward Howe. Laura believed her best books were The Golden Windows (1903) and The Silver Crown (1906), both collections of fables.
After years of struggling to keep the family paper mill in operation, the Richardses closed it in 1900 and opened a camp for boys, one of only three in the U.S. at that time. Camp Merryweather (named after the family in one of her book series) helped to nurture many national leaders. In addition, Laura was the literary mentor of a young man who became the famous poet Edwin Arlington Robinson.
The youngest child of an exiled Italian patriot and a half-Italian mother, Christina Rossetti lived in London her entire life. Her mother homeschooled her and nurtured her in the Christian faith, while her professor father encouraged her artistic interests and abilities. She also gained a great appreciation for nature during frequent visits to the country with her grandfather.
Her two brothers, Dante Gabriel and William, became accomplished artists, and the lovely young Christina often modestly posed for them and their painter friends. While the brothers worked magic on canvas, Christina wrote poetry. When she was seventeen, her grandfather privately published a small collection of her poems. Fifteen years later, when her book Goblin Market and Other Poems was published, England began to recognize Christina as a remarkably gifted poet.
Among Christina’s many famous friends was Professor Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice in Wonderland. After the success of his book, she wrote her small collection of fantasy stories called Speaking Likenesses. In a letter to her brother Dante Gabriel, she explained that the children in the stories were constantly encountering “speaking likenesses” (mirror images) of their own faults and character flaws. In this book and many of her other works, her theme was the need to resist temptation through self-discipline, gratitude, and humility.
Much of Christina’s writing centered on her deeply personal Christian faith. In spite of poor health, she wrote more than nine hundred poems and books of devotional prose, and worked for various missionary and charitable organizations. Today her name is largely unknown, except in literary circles where she is still recognized as one of the few great women poets of England. However, the words of several of her poems are known by many, especially the following lines from her Christmas Carol:
What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd
I would bring a lamb,
If I were a wise man
I would do my part,—
Yet what I can I give Him,
Give my heart.
Henry Jackson Van Dyke was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and attended Princeton University in New Jersey. After his graduation in 1873, he became pastor of the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York City. He served as its minister until 1899, when he returned to Princeton as a professor of English literature. Following twenty-four years as an English professor, he became a U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands and Luxembourg, and then moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church. He served as chairman of the committee that compiled the Presbyterian Book of Common Worship in 1905 and helped with its revision in 1932. As a hymn writer, he is best known for “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee.” He authored many books of sermons, essays, poetry, and inspirational writings. The most widely known of his works are The Other Wise Man (1896), a Christmas story, and his translation of German poet Novalis’s The Blue Flower (1902).