Dinny Gordon, Intellectual: Anne Emery's Postwar Junior Fiction and Girls' Intellectual Culture

Anderson, Jill E.

Item

Dinny Gordon, Intellectual: Anne Emery's Postwar Junior Fiction and Girls' Intellectual Culture

Anderson, Jill E.

Abstract

In her Dinny Gordon series (1958-1965), junior novelist Anne Emery’s heroine manifests intellectual desire, a passionate engagement in the life of the mind along with the desire to connect with like-minded others. Within a genre which focused on socialization and dating, in Dinny, Emery normalizes a studious, inner-directed, yet feminine heroine, passionate about ancient history rather than football captains. Emery’s endorsement of the pleasure Dinny takes in intellectual work, and the friends and boyfriends Dinny collects, challenge stereotypes of intellectual girls as dateless isolates while suggesting an alternative model of girlhood operating within apparent conformism to postwar “good girl” standards.

Comments

Author accepted manuscript version of an article published in Anderson, Jill. "Dinny Gordon, Intellectual: Anne Emery’s Postwar Junior Fiction and Girls’ Intellectual Culture." The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 7 no. 2, 2014, p. 243-266. Project MUSE, doi: https://doi.org/10.1353/hcy.2014.0027. Copyright © 2014 The Johns Hopkins University Press;