Sheila Egoff: <BR>Outspoken Critic And Champion Of Children's Literature

Outspoken Critic And Champion Of Children's Literature

For over forty years, Sheila Egoff has been an outspoken critic and champion of children’s literature. As a librarian, teacher, scholar, lecturer, and author, Egoff has encouraged excellence in writing for children and has pulled no punches in criticizing works she judges to be less than meritorious. Her dedication to high standards in children’s books has earned her many awards and honours in both Canada and the United States. Above all, Egoff has been recognized as a major force in the development and promulgation of Canadian children’s literature.

Although it can’t have been an easy task for a nationalist surrounded by the patriotic fervour of Canada’s Centennial Year, in The Republic of Childhood (1967) Egoff strove successfully for an objective evaluation of Canadian children’s literature. She judged children’s books by the same general literary standards that apply in writing for adults and compared the Canadian works with the best writing in other countries, especially Great Britain and the United States. Instead of limiting herself to discussions of the triumphs of children’s literature in Canada, Egoff devoted a significant amount of space to frank criticism of the failures, because she felt that a true understanding of what constitutes quality could only be acquired by considering the inadequacies of poor books together with the achievements of good ones.

Egoff has been severe in her criticism of Canadian children’s literature; nonetheless, she has always been quick to praise the strengths of our children’s literature, especially its firm roots in the land and its avoidance of the facile, simplistic, sterile problem novel which, she says, dominated without enriching American children’s books in the sixties and seventies.

One of the major problems in the development of Canadian children’s literature, Egoff feels, has been the small number of books published each year. This paucity has been a factor in lowered standards, since we have tended to welcome any addition to the ranks of Canadian children’s books—no matter how bad. As Egoff notes in this interview, this situation is rapidly changing for the better in Canada. She is even hopeful that Canadian children’s books will soon hold there own on the international literary scene.

Egoff, who is Professor Emeritus with the School of Librarianship at the University of British Columbia, is currently working on a book on fantasy literature.

Aurora: Judging from your criticism of children’s literature, you don’t seem to believe that any reading children do is good in itself. You’ve said that before giving a book to children, adults should read it and judge it because if the book isn’t good enough for adults, it isn’t good enough for children. How far would you carry this judgement? Would you refuse children access to books like the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys, or Nancy Drew?

Egoff: You should add to that list the new gothic novels and the baby Harlequins. No, I would never deny anyone access to any book. I feel very strongly, though, that such junk food for the mind should not be bought by public institutions. Selection is quite different from censorship. Having poor quality books in libraries, gives them a sort of cachet. I’m shocked sometimes at adults who are afraid to tell children that what they are reading isn’t all that worthwhile. If a child asks for a drink of Scotch, we say “no,” but somehow adults are cowards when it comes to saying to a child, “I think you should read something better.” Of course, our advice should always be accompanied by the corollary, “Let me help you find something that you might like.” When it comes to reading, we are very cautious about advice, perhaps because we never really know how the reader is going to take a book. I think we’ve been far too lax, far more than in Europe, for example. I have found that librarians in such countries as Norway and Sweden are far more selective than we Canadians. Sub-literature might be accessible in bookstores, but it wouldn’t be bought with public money.

Aurora: Are you concerned with violence in children’s literature? This is an issue of concern for some parents who deliberate about whether they should let the children read folktales, for instance, because of the violence found in them.

Egoff: One thing I am not worried about is violence in folktales. In the first place, violence in folktales is really conventional violence, violence that is connected with justice. The bad gets their punishment and the punishment suits the crime. In the famous folktale “Toads and Diamonds,” for example, when the generous-hearted girl speaks, diamonds come out of her mouth, and when the mean-spirited girl speaks, toads come out. Now that is typical conventional violence. I think that our ancestors perhaps knew the young better than we suspect. Children are innocents, and so they want justice. Adults are sinners who keep begging for mercy. I think we adults get more upset about the violence than children do.

I am far more concerned about the psychological violence found in many modern children’s books, Robert Cormier’s work, for example. Another example of this psychological violence is found in the highly praised book The Changeover by New Zealand writer Margaret Mahy. A dear little three-year-old boy is persecuted by an incubus, and all his life’s blood is being drained out of him. No one complains about this kind of violence, and yet we criticize folktales, forgetting that only a few relate rough justice and thousands of folktales are without it. We always take “Jack the Giant Killer” as an example because the evil giant has his head cut off. Or we condemn “Snow White” where the evil stepmother dances to her death in red-hot shoes. These are the tales that have been brought to public attention, instead of ones like “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” “The Musicians of Bremen,” “The Black Bull of Norroway,” or the Anansi stories—there are hundreds of them. No, I would say violence in folktales is the least of our worries.

Aurora: How about the presence of racism or sexism in children’s literature? Are you concerned with the effects they might have on children?

Egoff: I’ll leave sexism aside for the moment. Most fine children’s books, especially in the last twenty or twenty-five years, have not been racist. I know the complaint about Dr. Dolittle, for instance, regarding the part about Prince Bumpo who wants to be white, and there were complaints about an episode in one of the Mary Poppins books, but I would say most racism in children’s literature has probably been directed against the blacks in the United States. In Canada few episodes exist, except perhaps involving the Indians in some early books. Times change. We even think nowadays that it was denigrating to look upon the Indian as the noble savage. That attitude is absolutely gone from our children’s literature. You mentioned the Bobbsey Twins earlier. I find them denigrating towards the blacks, but no one has ever complained about the racism in them. We allow very poor literature to get away with racism but clobber some really fine stories, like Dr. Dolittle, for one episode. But, to sum up, no, I don’t think racism is rampant in children’s literature.

Aurora: What about Little Black Sambo? How would you judge that book?

Egoff: I would go so far as to say, change the title of the book and change the illustrations. I’ve heard that black children have come home from school crying because they’ve been called Sambo. That is hard to put up with, but if we really read the story, we find it’s wonderful. Did you know that Helen Bannerman wrote a book about a little white girl called Little White Squibba? It’s a feeble little thing. But Little Black Sambo is in the tradition of the hero story. I have known several young black women who felt strong enough within themselves to shrug off the racist issue and take Little Black Sambo for the good that’s in it. I think we become overly conscientious about a book like that.

Aurora: What would you do about a book like Huckleberry Finn? Would you give that to a child? Do you think children would understand the irony and recognize Twain’s critical or satiric stance?

Egoff: I think they would recognize the most important aspect of the book; that is, Finn’s courage in standing up for his black friend and not turning him in when society considered it correct to do so. Certainly children can grasp that concept. It’s a simple concept that appears in many children’s stories, particularly fantasies and quest stories—standing up for what you believe inside yourself. I think that Huckleberry Finn is one of our great books.

Aurora: Let’s go back to sexism. How do you feel about books like Anne of Green Gables where the heroine is assigned the traditional female role? Anne comes into the story as an untraditional, unconventional girl, but she’s tamed; the wild one is domesticated. Do you see this book as a problem for conveying appropriate role models to children?

Egoff: No, particularly because I don’t believe in taking a book out of its social context. The author, L. M. Montgomery, was a wonderful and independent woman. Her books reflect the manners and mores of her time.

What bothers me are all these new baby Harlequins and Gothic love stories. These I do find sexist. They’re intended for a teenage audience, but they are so simply written that girls as young as ten are reading them and can’t wait to start dating. If they keep reading these books, I’m never going to see a woman prime minister of Canada, am I? It isn’t that these books are particularly sexist, except that they all lead to dates, boyfriends, and romance, like the patterned teenage novel of the 1950s. You remember the Dujardins and the Cavannas? Well, baby Harlequins and Gothic romances are just slicker, more modern versions of the same thing. I find them sexist in that way, and I think that reading a great many of them—and don’t forget that there are a great many of them—will have an effect. A child could spend almost all her formative childhood years reading these romances. I think they contain a worse kind of sexism than a remark here and there in an otherwise fine novel.

Aurora: You’ve been hard on the problem novel that’s been so popular in the last 20 or 25 years. You’ve categorized it as a form of “new didacticism” that, instead of telling children how to behave as the old didacticism did, tells them how to live emotionally. You’ve described the problem novel as dominated by highly superficial and mediocre writing, and as the province of the poor reader or of the good reader going through a phase. Is this still your judgement, or do you feel that the problem novel has developed into a more meaningful and significant literary subgenre lately?

Egoff: The problem novels are much better now because they don’t concentrate exclusively on one problem anymore. In other words, a little bit more is going on in the protagonists’ lives. The one thing I objected to most about the problem novels was that when you read them, you simply got the problem in a highly simplified style and nothing else. You should get something else from your reading, some enrichment. The great example in adult literature that explains my point is Dorothy Sayers’ detective story, The Nine Tailors. Who would think that you’d get interested in bell ringing from reading a detective story? You learn something as well about the English Fen countryside.

Don’t forget that all the early problem novels emanated from the United States. They were all urban, all involved single-parent families. They were very narrow indeed. I understand, however, that the newer problem novels are broader in their treatment and that the characterization is more developed.

Aurora: In Precepts, Pleasures, and Portent you wrote, “We know a great deal about children clinically and psychologically, but what do we know of their literary needs?” What do you perceive to be the literary needs of children?

Egoff: I don’t think we take enough time with children’s free reading. We don’t find out what moves them or what they are interested in. Oh, we say, “Here’s a good book” or, “You’ll like this”, but we don’t try to relate it to the child. Children don’t have as much time to read anymore, which makes what they are reading even more important. More guidance should be given children in schools or public libraries. If a child asks a librarian for a certain type of book that the library doesn’t have, a really first-rate librarian should know enough about children’s literature to be able to have a discussion with the child and suggest a substitute. But most people have a jerky knowledge of children’s literature. Most teachers don’t take children’s literature courses because they aren’t compulsory.

We tend not to stretch children in their reading. You know as well as I the number of teachers who will keep on reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to grade five and six children when they should stretch the young with far more wonderful books. Children will find Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for themselves. Teachers and librarians should find the things that the young won’t come across on their own.

Aurora: In the early seventies you noted that Canadian children’s books had not “joined the mainstream of current writing”. You commented that they remained “eminently stable, if not downright conservative” and that, while the children’s literature of other English-speaking nations was focusing on sociological and psychological problems, Canadian children’s literature was still fascinated with nature and the environment, that it was all taken up with adventure stories. Has this situation changed?

Egoff: I think it has changed quite dramatically, especially in the realistic novel. I was probably referring to Farley Mowat’s Lost in the Barrens and books like that. Well, now we have really sophisticated writers such as Brian Doyle (although, frankly, I really don’t know yet how popular he is with the young). There is also Jan Truss’s very fine book, Jasmin, which certainly has child-centered problems and, of course, we have Monica Hughes’s science fiction novel The Keeper of the Isis Light, which is one of those books that is both simple and profound. Kevin Major’s Hold Fast is an example of a first-rate problem novel with a marvellous background. I often like the Canadian problem novels much more than the American ones because of their background. I sense that in the modern realistic Canadian novel, people are very attached to the area in which they live and manage to get it across to us very well. A new book that everybody is praising is Julie, by Cora Taylor. I don’t think it will be very popular, but the background is really wonderful. It’s about a little girl and how she tries to learn to handle her ESP powers. You discover what a small; modern, Alberta farm is really like. I think our writing is very regional. In a country this size it has to be. Although the situation is changing, our best Canadian children’s books are still very much concerned with a love of the landscape and the environment.

Aurora: How about books for the child who is just beginning to read? You’ve commented in the past on the shortage of Canadian books in this area.

Egoff: I’m afraid I haven’t paid too much attention to that area, but I understand that it has improved, too. Now we have books such as Chin Chang and the Dragon’s Dance and Brenda and Edward. The greatest explosion has been in books for the preschool child. Never before have we had babies’ books put out by Tundra: “mini books for mini hands,” board books, alphabet books, counting books. Up until a few years ago, we counted on British and American imports for our very young children. At last we have some of our own, and they seem to be coming in increasing numbers. It’s really quite surprising. I put most of this down to sociological reasons, such as the great emphasis on the preschool child by parents who only have one or two children so they have more time to concentrate on them. And then there are the single-parent households or ones in which both parents are working. Their children are in nursery schools and day-care centres where teachers do a lot with books. I never hear that my librarian colleagues go out anymore to give book talks to children in grade six or seven, but every library has its books for babies’ story hour, its toddlers’ story hour, and so on.

All of this has contributed to the explosion of books for the preschool child, as has the rise of the small presses. Many of our small presses, such as Annick Press, only publish picture books. We are becoming very rich in picture books. The diversity of artistic styles in the illustrations is really astonishing. If I have one criticism at all about our new picture books, it’s that so often the illustrations are far better than the text. For example, in Who Goes to the Park, that wonderful new book about High Park in Toronto by a Japanese artist, the pictures are absolutely beautiful, but the text is pretty pedestrian. The illustrators have really taken over.

Aurora: Do you have a favourite Canadian children’s author?

Egoff: No, you can’t have a favourite Canadian children’s author because not enough of the new ones have yet produced a sufficient body of work. Ruth Nichols has stopped writing. She hasn’t written a children’s book since the 1970s. Farley Mowat hasn’t written since the 1960s, and Kevin Major and Jan Truss have only written a couple of books. Barbara Smucker has written two fine historical novels, but I’ve just read her new book, White Mist, and I don’t like it much. If I had to pick a favourite Canadian author, I would choose Brian Doyle because one keeps wondering what he’s going to do next. I think Angel Square is a remarkable book and so is Up to Low. However, I don’t think these new books will have the popularity of some of our older books, such as Anne of Green Gables or Farley Mowat’s Owls in the Family.

Here’s another interesting observation not only about Canadian children’s books but also about the British and American. All of our books have older protagonists now than previously. Few people are writing for children between eight and eleven years who have just become real readers. We’re not writing for the age group for which The Borrowers or Charlotte’s Web were written. I think the reason for this change is that the books are so wrapped up with heavy problems that the authors have to make their protagonists older so that they can cope with them. In, for example, the American novel by Virginia Hamilton, Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush, the heroine is fourteen. She doesn’t have a father. Her mother only comes home about once a month to leave a bit of money or put some food in the house. The fourteen-year-old not only has to look after herself, but she also has to look after her older retarded brother who has a debilitating disease. Now these are some burdens. Many modern writers do this sort of thing to their protagonists. In Margaret Mahy’s The Changeover, the mother is divorced, the daughter is jealous because her mother has a new boyfriend, the little brother is being sucked dry by an incubus, and the young protagonist has to cope with it all. These new protagonists have no time to be young, and so they can’t be like little Fern in Charlotte’s Web. She doesn’t have any particular problems-—she just quietly grows up, forgets the animals, and enjoys the fair.

Aurora: Are nursery rhymes still popular with children or do you think poetry like Dennis Lee’s in Alligator Pie and Jelly Belly is replacing them?

Egoff: No, I think the nursery rhyme will endure. Recently I was buying a book of nursery rhymes for my brand new great nephew, and there were so many that even I could hardly choose. Now, the publishers aren’t going to publish nursery rhymes if there isn’t a market. All the other countries in the world envy us the British nursery rhymes. I just can’t think of doing without them, and I don’t think that Dennis Lee’s work will supplant them, although he is very popular. I doubt if there is a child in Canada who doesn’t know “Alligator Pie, Alligator Pie”.

Aurora: What do you think of the illustrations in Lee’s books? Do you feel that his works are another instance of the illustrations being better than the text?

Egoff: No. Lee has a new illustrator for his latest book, and I think I like his work better. I always found the Frank Newfeld illustrations a little bit static. I like a bit of Canadian content, by the way. I must admit to being a bit nationalistic, but I hope to goodness I’m not chauvinistic. It’s nice to have a verse that brings in Sault Ste. Marie and Chicoutimi and all the rest. When it comes to some of Lee’s newer nonsense verses, however, like “Shark in the Park”, well, just give me Edward Lear anyday. No one can match Lear for that kind of nonsense.

Aurora: How do children’s books written by Canadian authors who are better known for their adult literature measure up to the work of authors who focus primarily on the child reader? Lee is one example of such an author but there are many others, such as Mordecai Richier, Margaret Laurence, Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn MacEwen.

Egoff: Generally it’s been an axiom in children’s literature that the best children’s books have been written by people who wrote for both adults and children, such as Kenneth Grahame, Walter de la Mare, A. A. Milne, George MacDonald, Lewis Carroll, Oscar Wilde, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling. All the great literature of the Victorian and the Edwardian ages was written by people who wrote for both audiences. This has changed—it began to change in the 1950s. Usually the most successful children’s authors today are those who are professional children’s authors-—Jill Paton Walsh, Mollie Hunter, Leon Garfield, Alan Garner. You mentioned Margaret Laurence and Margaret Atwood. I don’t think highly of their children’s books at all, I’m afraid. I’d never miss them. Margaret Laurence’s animal fantasy, Jason’s Quest is simply terrible. Richler’s Jacob Two-Two, however, is interesting—it’s not great, but it’s fun. And kids need to have some fun. Have Canadian children’s books “missed the boat?” There are some who think so. Writing in a background for the Royal Commission on Book Publishing, George Woodcock suggests that: “This is a highly professional field of literary craftsmanship very much controlled by supply and demand, and it would seem that the decline is due less to the lack of writers than to the lack of interest in Canadian juveniles on the part of parents and perhaps also of children, who are inhabitants of microcosms rather than of nations. This may be one situation in which we should not strive officiously to keep alive.

Certainly we haven’t enough people writing children’s books, and certainly much that has been written is downright dull. It must be admitted that few Canadian children’s books are widely popular. So few books appear that there is little healthy competition or welcome variety; even worse, the shortage is most serious at the exact place where books count the most—picture books for the pre-school child and books for younger children. Even the statistics in publishing offer some discouragement for there has been a marked decrease since the middle sixties in the actual number of titles published a year.

Even so, the flourishes would seem to outdo the alarms. A very substantial gain derives from the notable improvement of late in the quality of writing, in illustration, over-all design and production. Canadian children’s books have never been better. And there are other compensations, too. In missing out in the turmoil of the Sixties we have avoided major disasters. Many of the so-called avante-garde American publications are really “non-books” written to the order of the editors and designed to catch a vogue. Indeed, Canadian children’s books may even be more “with it” than they appear. In concentrating upon the environment as a natural part of our lives; in stressing themes of conversation and respect for people who are still close to the land; in avoiding the “personal problem” book in favour of larger attitudes of courage and self-reliance; in all these ways we may well belong to tomorrow, if not to today.

Books by Sheila Egoff

Thursday’s Child: Trends and Patterns in Contemporary Children’s Literature. Chicago: American Library Association, 1981.

The Republic of Childhood: A Critical Guide to Canadian Children’s Literature in English, 2nd edition. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1975.

Notable Canadian Children’s Books: An Annotated Catalogue, prepared by Sheila Egoff and Alvine Bélisle. Ottawa:National Library of Canada, 1973.

Only Connect: Readings on Children’s Literature, 2nd edition, edited by Sheila Egoff et al. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1980.

One Ocean Touching: Papers from the First Pacific Rim Conference on

Children’s Literature, edited by Sheila A. Egoff. London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1979.

Extract from the introduction to Notable Canadian Children’s Books pp. 14-16; reprinted in Canadian Library Journal, Ottawa: National Library of Canada, 1973

(“Stars that gem the blue,” Canadian Library Journal 30 [Sept.-Oct. 1973], 396).

Dr. Hamilton is Associate Professor of English and Humanities, and Co-ordinator of Literature for Children at Athabasca University.

Aurora Update

Since publishing this article, Ms. Egoff's book, Worlds Within (1988) was published. The book describes and analyzes children's fantasy from the Middle Ages to the present.

Sheila Egoff officially retired in 1983, but currently works to enhance and catalogue UBC's Arkley Collection of early and rare children's books, housed in UBC's Special Collections Division.

In 1987 the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize award was established and is presented annually for the best children's book published the previous year by a writer who has lived in British Columbia for three of the previous five years (published anywhere in the world).

Books by Sheila Egoff

Aurora Update

Note: Sheila Egoff died May 22, 2005.

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