Each of us has a narrative compass, a story that has guided our lifework. In this extraordinary collection, women scholars from a variety of disciplines identify and examine the stories that have inspired them, haunted them, and shaped their research, from Little House on the Prairie to Little Women, from the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Nancy Drew, Mary Jane, and even the Chinese memoir Jottings from the Transcendant's Abode at Mt. Youtai. Telling the "story of her story" leads each of the essayists to insights about her own approach to studying narratives and to a deeper, often surprising, understanding of the power of imagination.

Contributors are Deyonne Bryant, Minjie Chen, Cindy L. Christiansen, Beverly Lyon Clark, Karen Coats, Wendy Doniger, Bonnie Glass-Coffin, Betsy Hearne, Joanna Hearne, Ann Hendricks, Rania Huntington, Christine Jenkins, Kimberly Lau, Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, Maria Tatar, Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Roberta Seelinger Trites, Claudia Quintero Ulloa, and Ofelia Zepeda.
 

Scholars traditionally distinguish Mark Twain from Louisa May Alcott based on gender differences, but Roberta Seelinger Trites argues that there are enough similarities between the two authors’ intellectual lives that their novels share interconnected social agendas. Trites does not imply that Twain and Alcott influenced each other—indeed, they had little effect on each other—but, paradoxically, they wrote on similar topics because they were so deeply affected by the Civil War, by cataclysmic emotional and ?nancial losses in their families, by their cultural immersion in the tenets of Protestant philosophy, and by sexual tensions that may have stimulated their interest in writing for adolescents. 

Trites demonstrates how the authors participated in a cultural dynamic that marked the changing nature of adolescence in America, provoking a literary sentiment that continues to inform young adult literature. Both intuited that the transitory nature of adolescence makes it ripe for expressions about human potential for change and reform. Twain, Alcott, and the Birth of the Adolescent Reform Novel explores the effects these authors’ extraordinary popularity had in solidifying what could be called the adolescent reform novel. The factors that led Twain and Alcott to write for youth, and the effects of their decisions about how and what to write for that audience, involve the literary and intellectual history of two people—and the nation in which they lived.

The Sleeping Beauty in Roberta Seelinger Trites' intriguing text is no silent snoozer passively waiting for Prince Charming to energize her life. Instead she wakes up all by herself and sets out to redefine the meaning of “happily ever after.” Trites investigates the many ways that Sleeping Beauty's newfound voice has joined other strong female voices in feminist children's novels to generate equal potentials for all children.

Waking Sleeping Beauty explores issues of voice in a wide range of children's novels, including books by Virginia Hamilton, Patricia MacLachlan, and Cynthia Voight as well as many multicultural and international books. Far from being a limiting genre that praises females at the expense of males, the feminist children's novel seeks to communicate an inclusive vision of politics, gender, age, race, and class. By revising former stereotypes of children's literature and replacing them with more complete images of females in children's books, Trites encourages those involved with children's literature—teachers, students, writers, publishers, critics, librarian, booksellers, and parents—to be aware of the myriad possibilities of feminist expression.

Roberta Trites focuses on the positive aspects of feminism: on the ways females interact through family and community relationships, on the ways females have revised patriarchal images, and on the ways female writers use fictional constructs to transmit their ideologies to readers. She thus provides a framework that allows everyone who enters a classroom with a children's book in hand to recognize and communicate—with an optimistic, reality-based sense of “happily ever after”—the politics and the potential of that book.