The other day I was looking through my site statistics as I sometimes do, and noted a plethora of searches to do with the aforementioned book. They were specifically to do with Alice’s age. I won’t list them because if Google happens to see value in this post it might start sending the searchers here and my writing today isn’t about answering the question (though I will answer the question later because I’ll need to).

Instead I want to explore that plethora itself. You’ll often see similar search phrases that result in the one answer; everyone words things differently. It was the sheer number of differences that struck me, the differences suggesting that the motives behind the questioned differed too. I wondered why people were asking. (There was also a bit of ‘why now?’ in there – I wrote about the reading age for the book almost a year ago and it’s only recently that numbers have swelled.)

Alice’s age is provided by Carroll in the sequel, Through The Looking-Glass – seven years old. Whilst not given in the first book, we can assume she was six or seven then because the first takes place a few months before the second, May and November respectively. So we’ve an easy answer to the question of why people are asking – the age isn’t provided in the first book and it’s safe to assume that a good number of people don’t get to the second. The question also means that it’s more likely people haven’t read either book and are perhaps looking to ascertain how appropriate it would be for their own child to read. It tends¹ to be the case, after all, that in children’s literature, the character’s ages match the intended audience. One of the phrases in my stats was specifically requesting an Alice book ‘for kids’ – clearly this person (a parent?) had misgivings about the story, and I don’t blame them – after reading it myself a few years ago I decided not to buy a copy for my nephew until he was a little older than Alice herself.

(I’ll note here that there were a few searches in the same vein as our main question for Through The Looking-Glass. This could be a different, shorter, post but I think it’s best summed up as wanting to make sure the story doesn’t move too far ahead from the first as to mean that a child – likely deemed old enough for Alice by whatever metric – would have to mature in order to continue. It’s safe to assume that Carroll was looking for or was asked to provide more of the same, hence the short time frame between them.)

This leads us neatly onto the topic of context – are people asking in order to understand the Victorian context of this 1865 book? In my post about the target audience for the book, I wrote about the way the book was clearly written for children but how cultural change means that in our modern world it’s pretty violent and a bit too strange. Certainly Alice is a mix of very mature and not so, which reflects both her age and environment and suits her character’s role in the didactic book. It is interesting to look at the novel in the context of its time, to compare it to others – few have stood the passing of the centuries like Carroll’s – and see where morals and values as well as views about childhood come into play.

In this way I wonder if the secondary meaning behind asking about Alice’s age is relevant here – how old is the book that bears her name?

And on that note, therefore, somewhat, what is the reading level of the book? Does the appropriate age group of a modern child match the target reading level? When I gave it to my nephew, via grandma, I said it might be best read together; he’s a good reader but he necessarily lacks a Victorian child’s mindset. One searcher wanted to know if the book could be read by five-year-olds.

Lastly, looking at different interpretations of phrases, I think it’s possible some searchers are looking to study the content’s appropriateness in terms of Alice’s age, maybe also in terms of her social context. How appropriate is it for a child of seven to be dreaming of heads being cut off and what would her environment have been like? The law was different back then, and as we know from the information available about the progression of early children’s literature, childhood had until recently been viewed very differently to the way we view it now; the idea of childhood began in the 1600s.

I don’t think there are any conclusions to be made here; this post must remain exploratory. But certainly, wondering about the background behind these searches was interesting in a way wondering the same about other searches was not – I gave pondering other search subjects a try in order to ascertain the worth of this post.

When did you last ask ‘why’ of something in literature and what did you discover?

Footnotes

¹ I say tends because we very much have to exclude Lyra and Will. On that note it’s interesting that the sales information for The Secret Commonwealth notes that it is for adults. Despite Lyra’s older age, it’s naturally going to be mistaken sometimes for a children’s book.

How do short stories and novels compare to you?

It makes sense to first consider the question of whether or not you like short stories. And, if you do like them, what are the similarities and differences that you appreciate between them?

I enjoy short stories. I like the way the need to be succinct often results in a better, tighter, story and writing in general. But I’m undecided as to the way it can take you (me, in this case) longer to ascertain background contexts, moods and so on – the details novels have time to sprinkle over numerous pages – due to that need for everything to be concise. It takes more time, literally, in terms of mental energy, to ‘learn’ everything you need to understand in order to appreciate a short story; even though you learn throughout a novel, it’s slower. In a short story you learn more, often right up to the end, in a way you don’t when reading a novel, and the whole way through the short story the learning is both prominent and very obvious – there are more ‘aha!’ moments. A novel needs a certain amount of focus. A short story needs more and if you’re reading a collection this focus needs reigning in over and over again, starting from the start again and again – supposing the stories are short enough that you read more than one in a sitting. The foresight of knowing I’ll have to refocus forms a small part of why I don’t read many collections.

How do writer’s novels compare to their short stories? I tend to find myself looking forward to a novel after a writer debuts with a collection I’ve enjoyed; I look forward in a chronologically backwards manner to stories of writer’s whose novel I’ve read first. I’m thinking here of Maile Meloy – I started with her novella; her first publication was a collection, then she released the novella and its sequel, and returned with another collection. I read her first collection last. Likewise, though looking forward this time, I was hopeful that Jessie Greengrass would publish a novel after her collection: she did; Orlando Ortega-Medina did too, recently, following his excellent collection.

Do we expect writers to move on to novels? Is a novel more ‘real’ in terms of literature?

And what about collections of stories on one theme or stories that are linked in other ways? I’m thinking here of Helen Oyeyemi’s What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours; when looking at the collections on my shelves I almost missed this one because the characters and themes are close enough to make you think, once the text is no longer fresh in your mind, that the collection is actually a novel.

How do short stories and novels compare to you?

I recently set aside a few hours to go through every post on the blog that contained a book title, checking links. It’s the sort of blog maintenance job that takes time even if you’ve done it before; regardless of the fact there will be new links to check in terms of time always moving forward, you inevitably miss links – I fully expect to find a couple of ‘old’ links next time I do it. These are the mulling-it-over results:

I found myself a bit embarrassed by some posts, the lack of experience I had at the time showing through. In addition to general content, I’d spelt a number of titles wrong.

It made me nostalgic, especially about the books I read before I started blogging, books I wish I had reviewed. It would be impossible to review them now; I may have to go back to a few that I know would make good discussions.

Despite trying my best not to repeat topics – at most I’ll write spin offs or follow-ups – I saw that I had repeated once or twice, though there was more content in the later repetitions. It’s one of the issues with headings – if you go through your posts to check whether you’ve covered a topic you won’t always find a clear answer because you may have worded it differently in the past.

I’ve written about Persuasion a fair amount but have never reviewed it. I didn’t enjoy it much either of the two times I read it but I’m not sure why I didn’t review it.

If you’re a blogger and have been for at least a few years I recommend going back to your own older posts. The potential embarrassment is worth it for the feelgood factor of learning it provides.

I would love to hear your own experiences of going back over things you’ve written, or similar – it doesn’t have to be writing – if there’s one thing that’s evident it’s that hearing about lessons others have learned can help the next person learn quicker.

When I originally wrote about (not) leaving reviews until later, I was roughly two and a half years into blogging. That was a long enough time to have collected some experience of the process, but I knew I had a lot left to learn.

I now find that the concept and resulting act of writing a review immediately after finishing the book is not always the best choice. (Or writing as immediately as possible – you can’t always time your reading of the last pages to match a following time slot in which to write.) If a book is simple or just straightforward, and doesn’t require too much thought, an immediate review can work, but most often I have to let ideas I want to include percolate for a while; I also sometimes need time to think back on what I’ve read to work out what I want to say or what I can say – some books’ themes are not immediately apparent.

Yet I still subscribe to the idea of writing as soon as possible in terms of getting things done. I’ve been using it consistently for a while now; done is better than perfect. It really is – you can have the best ideas in the world but if they’re only in your head and not on the page, their worth isn’t tangible. Done rather than perfect can result in the feeling that you’ve not done your best, and that’s frustrating, but better to have something rather than nothing. Certainly there’s a correlation between the numbers of notes made on a book and the time it takes to finish the review unless those notes are structured as a plan already.

Allowing thoughts to percolate works best if note-taking happens concurrent to the reading. I realised this recently; if not taken at the time of creation, as much as you might remember what the note was, you lose the context surrounding it. This context might not be important; when it is, it’s generally vital. I don’t mean references or anything like that, I mean the sort of context that involves where you were when you had the thought, what your exact feelings were – the specifics behind the note that transcend the text you were taking notes on. For example if I copy out a passage from a book with the comment ‘this shows what the weather was like’, when I come back to the note later I’ll miss my own added subtext that would have otherwise brought clarity. The comment with the subtext included might be ‘this shows what the weather was like, specifically I’m looking at the first sentence which links to…’

It’s a certain sort of thoroughness.

Something I find endlessly fascinating the thought that if you written the piece – review in my case, sometimes another type of post, but rarely – at a slightly different time, you might or probably would have written it differently. I feel this most when I’m happy with the finished piece, when I’ve been surprised by the routes my thoughts took during writing flurries, which can happen regardless of whether I was following a plan – that all makes sense. What might you have written if you’d started an hour prior to the one you did? What might you have focused on then? What might you have lost or gained in pausing as you did to get a coffee? I find I tend to feel that I wouldn’t have done so well but there’s always that thought – if I’m happy with what I did write, how much happier might have I been if I’d written it earlier or later?

(When I went back to my older post after writing this, I realise these thoughts have been with me for a very long time. It’s a shame that, except for fiction, we’ll never be able to really look into it. There’s a reason Sliding Doors is so well known.)

What is your process like in this regard, no matter what you write (or compose or paint, and so on)?

Agora Books, previously Ipso Books and established in 2015, is the digital-first publishing arm of literary agency Peters Fraser Dunlop. The publisher releases two sorts of work – brand new books, and the books of forgotten authors of the past decades, such as Anne Melville’s 1980s historical novel which I reviewed last month.

Their latest reprint, Taking Heart, will be released tomorrow; it’s the first book in a historical series by Rowena Summers (a pen name for Jean Saunders), originally published in 2000. It’s a book that will interest you if you like pre-war (WWII in this case) family sagas. I received a copy of the book; I’d thought I’d introduce you to the author in case she’s someone whose work you’d like to look into yourselves, and I’m posting the synopsis here in lieu of a review.

Jean Saunders, who also wrote under the names Jean Innes (her maiden name), Sally Blake, Rachel Moore, and, once, Jodi Nicols (for her solo erotic novel), became a writer in 1974. Born in 1923, she passed away after an illness in 2011. Her second novel was her first published, and following this she received several rejections. It’s a bit different to the usual story.

Saunders wrote just over 100 novels, and published approximately 600 short stories in magazines. Her 1970s début was in the gothic romance genre, in which she continued until the 1980s when she switched to regular historicals. Her books under the name Rowena Summers were the most popular.

The author was the 17th Chairman of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, holding the post for two years between 1993-1995. In later years she lectured in writing, often on cruise ships, and wrote a number of books on the craft.

Agora Books have so far published 6 of Saunders’ books; Taking Heart will be the first under a pen name. Here is the synopsis:

Imogen and her sisters are fighting to save their childhood home and remain in Bristol. Their father has announced the sale of the family business and everything is about to change.

But when a terrible tragedy tears the family apart, the Caldwell girls must forge their own paths in life. And with the Second World War looming over England, their lives begin to change more drastically than they could have imagined.

Through love and heartbreak, fear and loss, can the Caldwell girls make it out unscathed? Or will they be swept up in the chaos of the changing times?

And here’s the first line:

As the family gathered in the sitting-room of the tall Bristol house that Sunday afternoon, Quentin Caldwell looked at his three daughters with immense satisfaction and pride.

Agora’s books are available on Amazon; both ebook and paperback copies of Taking Heart are here.