I had lots of baby dolls. Orange Blossom I received the Christmas my little sister turned one; when you squeezed her stomach she “blew” orange-scented kisses. And Martha Jean (renamed after my grandmother), my first treasured Cabbage Patch Kid.

Eventually, these dolls were lost to history, so to speak. I don’t have any of my old dolls. I’m an adult woman with two children. Kids play with dolls to prepare for parenthood, after all.

Or do they? Is something infinitely weirder going on?

Dare Wright’s The Lonely Doll series (recently reissued) followed the richly photographed adventures of the author’s own childhood doll, Edith (named after the author’s mother). Dare Wright, herself, sometimes coddled but mostly smothered by her mother, never stopped playing with Edith; the books were born of her already obsessive hobby of photographing herself and her doll in various handmade costumes.

Jean Nathan’s meticulously researched Dare Wright biography, “The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright,” argues conclusively that Dare Wright explored her sad childhood and stifling adulthood in her photographs and stories. According to Nathan, “Edith became a lonely doll, as Dare once had been a lonely little girl, wishing for a brother, however naughty, to play with, and a father who might be enlisted as a reliable parent to care for them both. In this rendition of the story, Edith’s wish comes true” (163).

Outside her home, Dare was a successful author, a sophisticated and beautiful sometimes model, pursued (hopelessly) by wealthy men; inside, Dare reenacted her traumatic childhood events with a cast of two teddy bears and a doll.  Dare never married or had children — she was too damaged for that kind of emotional intimacy — but I don’t think having a child would necessarily have changed her relationship with Edith. Dare didn’t see Edith as a baby, but as her own mirror image. With Edith, Dare could forever relive childhood, always closing with a happy ending.

I was left unsettled by the end of the biography, not thinking of Dare, but of myself. It had never occurred to me that, as a child, I might have thought of the baby dolls as versions of myself, not merely babies to play with. It makes a lot of sense though — children stop playing with dolls around the age they are beginning to craft what will ultimately be their adult identities.

I stopped playing with dolls around fifth grade, when I started being aggressively bullied. At about the same time, I developed a rich and detailed fantasy life, inventing stories where isolated young people found companionship, bullies were vanquished, and everyone lived happily ever after. Twenty-plus years later, I’m still writing stories about loners making good.

Dare Wright played with dolls well into her sixties. I don’t play with dolls — I write stories with characters.

That’s very different, right?

There were many reasons my grandfather left Arkansas for San Francisco, and there are myriad reasons he hasn’t picked a boll of cotton since.

Children know when something is wrong with their world. And the little boy in the picture knows something’s not right, as small as he is. You can see it in his little face, the frown in his forehead.

Children — before they learn that it makes adults uncomfortable — can’t ignore when something is not right. They pose simple questions: why do some people think one person isn’t as good as another, because of the color of their skin? Why hasn’t a woman been president? Why did my grandpa die? The simplicity that kills me, because my convoluted answers are never as good as their questions.

Children are so direct. When they see something wrong, they can’t figure out why the adults in their world — who they see as all-powerful — won’t fix it. I’m drawn to stories of children who take matters into their own hands, and Bayou is such a story.

What happens when you cross Jim-Crow-era racial tension, two little girls, and a Southern mythology as creative and beautiful as it is terrifying?

You get Bayou.

A deservedly acclaimed graphic novel, told from the perspective of a little black girl in 1930s Mississippi, Bayou is equal parts beauty and horror. Bayou contrasts the very real and terrifying world — in which a little boy can be lynched for whistling at a white woman — with an equally chilling fantasy world, in which benevolent spirits and talking animals flee from bloodthirsty golliwogs and murderous Jim Crows. It’s not always clear which world is scarier.

Little Lee, growing up on the banks of the bayou, must descend into its malevolent waters to save her best friend, a white girl, and, in the process, free her father from a trumped-up kidnapping charge. So far, it’s touched on racism, “good hair,” religion, gender roles, and provided new looks at a whole host of stereotypes and problematic representations of Africans and African-Americans. If it weren’t a big spoiler, I would add — jumping up and down in my seat — that a major character is the demonic personification of one of my favorite Blues tropes.

Lee is strong, smart, and unflinchingly committed to the task of saving her father, no matter how frightening the journey may be. I loved her at once, and have added her to my small, growing collection of tough-cookie little girl heroines.

The first five chapters (and a bit of the sixth) are available online; Vol. 1, comprising the first four, is currently for sale, and Vol. 2, offering the conclusion, will be published next summer. In the meantime, the website keeps posting updates to the story, and I, for one, am completely hooked.

Bayou is just lovely and harrowing and deeply upsetting, and most emphatically not for children.

If you haven’t read it yet, you should. (If you have, feel free to read it again.) But be warned: you won’t accomplish much until you fetch up, full of questions and predictions, at the beginning of chapter 6. And you’ll probably make a childish sound of disappointment when you realize you’re going to have to wait months to find out how it all ends.

(My last years in high school were the height of my Sherlock Holmes obsession. Once I had read Arthur Conan Doyle’s canonical mysteries a hundred times, I started looking for other ways to spend time in Holmes’ Victorian London. I spent my free time trolling used and new bookstores for Sherlock Holmes pastiches, amassing a sizable collection for someone with no employment whatsoever.)

Once I cracked open the book, its first sentence electrified me.

“I was fifteen when I first met Sherlock Holmes, fifteen with my nose in a book as I walked the Sussex Downs, and nearly stepped on him.”

I walked while reading (still do). I was a teenager. And I very much wanted to meet Mr. Sherlock Holmes. Mary Russell and I already had a great deal in common, and I hadn’t even finished the first paragraph.

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice is the first of eight (so far) books in the Mary Russell series, in which Ms. King creates a really compelling alternate version of Sherlock Holmes. The books are fascinating and wonderfully researched, describing the end of the Victorian era and the rise of the Roaring Twenties, ranging from London to Palestine to my own native San Francisco. Mary Russell is unquestionably the main character, and she holds her own against the great detective.

Mary Russell has been described elsewhere as a partner finally worthy of Sherlock Holmes. She’s brilliant in her own right, and doesn’t exist merely as a foil for Holmes’ intellect. By the second book in King’s series, she has her own nascent career as a scholar in religious studies. To me, she seemed to be the grown-up equivalent of the little girl heroines I had loved – both smart and sensible, and taking guff from absolutely no one. Russell had moxie.

She could shoot straight, too.

I fell so in love with Mary Russell that I did something I have only done once: I wrote Laurie R. King to tell her so.

It’s funny – I was writing college applications at the time, probably, asserting to various officers of admission that I wanted to be an international lawyer or an activist or the President.

I wrote Ms. King the truth – that I wanted to become a writer. And she wrote me back, and encouraged me to try.

I’m still trying.

Each time a new Mary Russell book has been published, over the last fifteen years, I’ve connected with one of my favorite heroines of all time – and the reminder to get back to writing heroines of my own. I’m still giddy, remembering that Ms. King took the time to write me, remembering that even famous writers are real people who sit down and wrestle the blank page, remembering that even as a bewildered teenager this was my dream.

I’ve taken the plunge now, and it’s often discouraging and even a little frightening, but it’s nice to know my teenaged self would actually approve.

“No,” Ma said. “Poor Adam, all he had to wear was skins.”

Laura did not pity Adam. She wished she had nothing to wear but skins.

– Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House In The Big Woods

Ramona Quimby, who appears twenty years later, owes much to Laura Ingalls. Though Laura was a real person, her fictionalized biography puts forth a little girl who, despite living in a long-ago time, is very real to the young reader. She’s funny, and she struggles with normal childhood problems – sibling rivalry, naughtiness, and being menaced by bears. Her internal voice, like Sara Crewe’s, is definitely childlike, and Laura is not always nice, although she usually repents.

The concept of “feistiness” in a heroine is often problematic, both for adult and children’s literature. All too often, smart-aleckry and rudeness in a child are seen as examples of an irrepressible spirit. Laura is polite to her elders, and deferential to her parents, but that doesn’t make her any less aggressive. Again, and again, Laura chafes at the prescribed roles for little ladies on the Victorian prairie. She’s a daredevil, whether wading into leech-infested waters or riding behind Almanzo Wilder’s wild horses, more at home on the “wild” prairie than in the stifling little towns spreading west.

I love Laura’s mother, Caroline, who manages to combine an entirely Victorian sense of womanhood with the hard and crushing realities of frontier life. Initially, Laura and Caroline clash over Laura’s wild streak, and Laura seems to feel her perfect sister Mary is the favorite. Over time, however, as Mary goes blind and Laura proves herself a capable and compassionate sister — painting “word pictures” to describe prairie sunsets – the entire family comes to rely on Laura’s strength and fierce loyalty.

In short, what begins as “feistiness” matures into a steely core, that serves Laura well through famine, fire, and loss.

As a small child, I reread everything up to and including Little Town On The Prairie, at which point the adult love story annoyed me. (I finished the grown-up Laura books later. And, yes, I get it now.)

Little House in the Big Woods

Little House on the Prairie

A brief aside: I was obsessed with Little House on the Prairie for a time (I’ve always loved series). Through a total accident, I finally came into a copy of the Little House Cookbook, and it’s a brief and absorbing read if you’re interested in American foodways or Little House on the Prairie or, like me, both. I modified the fried chicken recipe for wings, to great success (secret: LARD), and I still keep meaning to make cottage cheese balls.

– “A Little Princess,” Frances Hodgson Burnett

Sara Crewe is, in fact, an old soul. She is compassionate and kind without being a Pollyanna, a waif with backbone and guts. Like the best literary heroines, she is brilliant and bookish, with an immense streak of imagination, and it serves her very well when terrible circumstances set her adrift.

Sara is a Romantic – in the big “R” sense of the word – trapped among very small-minded, petty Victorians, who understand neither her grand ideas nor her deep emotions. She ends by exposing the dark side of Victorian London, falling from princess to urchin; she’s not only aware of how far she has fallen, but also recognizes that her prior education and intelligence still give her an advantage over her fellow urchins – and uses those skills to help them. Sara is just as charitable when poor as when rich, but we’re allowed to see how much more that charity costs her, in particular, when she shares most of a windfall meal with a street child even worse off than she is.

It’s Sara’s self-awareness, I think, that’s so compelling, and it’s what gives her that “old look” in the quote above. She knows what’s happening to her is wrong, and it’s what her nemesis, Miss Minchin, hates most about her. It becomes unbearable for Miss Minchin to have Sara looking at her. Unlike her fellow servant, Becky, Sara knows children aren’t supposed to be starved and overworked, and Miss Minchin knows she knows.

Sara can give some modern-day adult waifs a run for their money: she’s an orphaned, destitute girl in Victorian England, but she is emphatically not a victim, trying her best to rationalize the terrible blow the universe has dealt her. She reminds herself to be resilient, and so she is.

Sara doesn’t have the same practicality Dorothy Gale exhibits, but she does have the same unshakeable common sense, somehow in perfect harmony with her flights of fancy. Their situations are not dissimilar: Dorothy is imprisoned by a witch in a dark fantasy land, Sara by a self-hating spinster who is the absolute monarch of her tiny and unimportant domain. (Sara’s London, full of adults either useless or cruel, smacks of Dorothy’s Oz). Both fight blatant injustice with a belief in truth and justice. Both win.

Best of all, once Sara is restored to her former riches, we see she hasn’t lost her self-awareness or her compassion:

The children stood and looked at each other for a few minutes; and then Sara took her hand out of her muff and held it out across the counter, and Anne took it, and they looked straight into each other’s eyes.

“I am so glad,” Sara said. “And I have just thought of something. Perhaps Mrs. Brown will let you be the one to give the buns and bread to the children. Perhaps you would like to do it because you know what it is to be hungry, too.”

“Yes, miss,” said the girl.

And, somehow, Sara felt as if she understood her, though she said so little, and only stood still and looked and looked after her as she went out of the shop with the Indian gentleman, and they got into the carriage and drove away.

Sara is trying to change the system, as only someone aware enough to notice the system in the first place can. I never noticed how subversive this book was before. Little girls: take note!

A Little Princess (Project Gutenberg etext)

I was an early reader, and my mother gave me a copy of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), with the original W. W. Denslow illustrations, to read on my own, likely on my belly, kicking my feet on the hardwood floors.

Dorothy and I were fast friends. As imagined by Denslow, she’s a grave, chubby little girl, struggling through dangers that would send a full-grown Hero packing. She is preternaturally wise, nearly unflappable, trapped in the sort of fairyland where none of the adults are reliable and your best allies are the creatures you’d least expect – scarecrows, tin men, lions, and scrappy little mutts.

Dorothy makes a journey worthy of Odysseus, through the valley of darkness and home again, without losing her faith or her humility. After a lifetime’s worth of adventures, the only time she breaks down and cries is after weeks of enslavement by the Witch of the West, and, even then, she keeps her wits about her enough to sneak her only remaining friend – the Cowardly Lion – food and comfort.

In the same way that P. L. Travers’ Mary Poppins loses her sharp wit in the translation to the big screen, the Hollywood Dorothy is not much like the literary Dorothy Gale. Dorothy of the movie only shows spunk to protect others; Dorothy Gale, over the course of the fourteen-book Oz series, stands up for herself. She’s not too good to be true; she’s a regular good person, impatient with people lacking in common sense, and a survivor whose intelligence and confidence – not some implausibly perfect goodness – help her to land on her feet in impossible situations.

Dorothy is partial to cryptic Kansas aphorisms that illustrate her core set of values. She is invariably brave, even when faced with the hilariously evil Nome King or the possibility of her beloved Fairyland’s annihilation. She becomes, by the end of the series, a fairyland Princess in her own right, an arbiter of justice, a protector of the weak.

In short, plenty of modern-day adult heroines could learn from Dorothy. Not the worst role model for a dreamy four-year-old, and not bad for 1900.

Suggested works:

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Project Gutenberg etext)

Ozma of Oz (Project Gutenberg etext)

The Road to Oz (Project Gutenberg etext)

I’ll begin at the beginning, with my favorite childhood literary heroines. Dorothy Gale will kick off, and we’ll pick up more girl friends as we go. Dorothy’s associates are a feisty bunch, and adventures just keep happening when they’re around. It should be fun.

If I have time, given how regular and prolific my posts are sure to be, I’ll get to the childhood heroines who did not receive invitations.

(Spoiler alert: Come April, Polly Pepper will certainly be cheerfully pretending her invite was lost in the mail.)