FORGOTTEN GIRL WRITERS

The story of Crane's literary career is intriguing, but what emphasizes its importance is the fact that she was just one out of a substantial number of child authors in both poetry and prose, mostly girls, who published in a short period from the close of the 1910s through the 1930s. Indeed, Crane is exemplary in a forgotten micro-genre of literature by children that exploded onto the literary market in the early twentieth century. This particular fad began in 1919, when a young British woman, Daisy Ashford, published a novel that she had written decades before when she was just nine years old: The Young Visiters, or Mr. Salteena's Plan. As the title indicates, editors chose to preserve Ashford's youthful misspellings, a conceit that readers found particularly endearing. The book, with an introduction by J. M. Barrie – creator of beloved children's icon Peter Pan – was a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic. In the years that followed, the novel was adapted into a popular play and was continuously in print for decades, selling over a half a million copies.Footnote ⁸ While Ashford's novel soared in popularity, American Opal Whiteley approached the editor of The Atlantic, Ellery Sedgwick, with the voluminous childhood diaries she kept of her adventures growing up in rural Oregon. Sedgwick, who, as Michelle Dean notes in a profile in the New Yorker, “was certainly aware that the current best-seller in the country was a novel reputed to have been written by a nine-year-old English child,” eagerly published her writings serially in the magazine and then as a book in 1920.Footnote ⁹ And Ashford and Whitely were just the beginning. Although it is difficult to create an exhaustive list of all the child-authored books published in the period, at least a dozen young writers were published, some with multiple works.Footnote ¹⁰ This fad for child writing was a publishing phenomenon, and by 1925 Crane was at the forefront of this mania for literary precocity.

Child or youth authorship had had bursts of popularity before, to be sure, but this 1920s surge in popularity of youth writing was unique because it focussed not on work by children in general or boys in particular but primarily on that by girls.Footnote ¹¹ Tellingly, when one of Crane's staunchest supporters, editor and poet Louis Untermeyer, defended Crane from accusations of a hoax, he explained her prodigy in a very gendered way: “Nathalia collects words the way a boy of her age collects postage stamps; she had thumbed Noah Webster's work (in various editions) and made a glossary of her own. The dictionary is her play-box and she knows exactly where every odd toy is concealed.”Footnote ¹² Indeed, it is undeniable that Crane was a logophile; she herself admitted to spending hours paging through the family dictionaries, as she explained in an interview: “They have so many fine words I never heard before; words that make me want to know them and love them. Yes, I love words, sweet words and noble words, too, because each word has a soul.”Footnote ¹³ Crane's exceptional focus and fascination with language, as well as her success in the field of letters, certainly suggests that she was a linguistic prodigy. But even so, there is something in her giftedness that, for Untermeyer at least, begs a comparison between boys and girls. So how does gender inform Crane's story? And more generally, what, at about this time in US history, generated such an interest in and market for girls’ writing? And how and why did this interest lead to mistrust and outright attacks?

The early twentieth century was a time of great change in the public perception of and intervention into childhood and girlhood, and this shift had a great impact on Crane's lived experience and poetic work; as such, the contemporary academic fields of childhood and girlhood studies can illuminate the social context of Crane's work and answer some of these questions. First of all, it is important to note that childhood, though we often think of it as an immutable category, is in large part a social construct.Footnote ¹⁴ As contemporary sociologists in the field of childhood studies Allison James and Alan Prout explain, the “immaturity of children is a biological fact of life but the ways in which this immaturity is understood and made meaningful are a fact of culture … It is these ‘facts of culture’ which may vary and which can be said to make of childhood a social institution.”Footnote ¹⁵ Like children themselves, childhood as a social institution is not static but is constantly changing and growing as the values of the culture shift.

Though it is a cultural institution, scholars of childhood studies generally eschew a monolithic understanding of childhood by analyzing a plurality of historical and cultural situations. According to Richard Mills, “childhood, or rather childhoods, are social constructions, cultural components inextricably linked to variables of race, class, culture, gender and time.”Footnote ¹⁶ But even as scholars have sought to expand the scope of study, James and Prout point out that the field has been dominated by the concept of social construction – noting that the most successful work in the field foregrounds it – and that in recent years some scholars are increasingly focussing on the rights and experiences of children themselves.Footnote ¹⁷ Here, as James, Chris Jenks, and Prout note, childhood studies replicates the central debate or conflict between “structure and agency” that is at the core sociological thought. In short, the question is whether individuals are constructed by social forces or have agency or free will to make their own decisions that affect society.Footnote ¹⁸ The problem, then, is that, though the construction of childhood is clearly a relevant topic, a focus on childhood as a concept can too easily turn children into mere objects and divest them of any agency they have over their own lives.

Girlhood studies highlights this conflict even more. Founded by scholars who found either that girls and the issues they faced were, because of a history of marginalization within patriarchal societies, distinct from childhood studies in general, or that they were being overshadowed by a focus on boys and boyhood, girlhood studies focusses on “a broad range of topics related to girls and girlhood as lived and experienced in different countries and contexts.”Footnote ¹⁹ Thus we can see the same plurality of focus but also a stronger emphasis on the lives of individual girls. Because it is a project that responds to a history of sexism and misogyny, agency is of particular importance in the field in terms of content and methodology, as April Mandrona notes:

Mandrona notes that, because of this, the focus of the field “should be research and engagement with girls … that aim to draw attention to their literal absence and voicelessness in initiatives that affect their lives.”Footnote ²¹ Similarly, Mitchell and Reid-Walsh define the “girl-method” for working in the field to emphasize “[i]ncluding the girls themselves as participants (so that they are agents and not subjects).”Footnote ²² Thus the methodology of the field reflects both the subject and the agency debates by striving to give voice to girls as much as possible. In this article, I am mindful both of the relevance of understanding childhood and girlhood as constructed social categories and of the necessity of letting girls speak for themselves with regard to their lived experience. Thus I will analyze the writing of one real girl with the same level of attention and respect as I would accord an adult author, while also contextualizing the social forces and perceptions of girlhood as a social category, demonstrated by Crane's vexed reception.

CHILDREN AND GIRLS IN US HISTORY TO THE 1920S

Crane was born in 1913 and began writing poetry on the family typewriter in 1922, at about nine years of age. This was a time of dramatic change in the lives of women and girls; indeed, the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote in the US, was ratified about one week after Crane's seventh birthday. So the changing nature of girlhood in the period can only be understood with reference to the newfound political agency of women. Indeed, childhood in the US in general has historically been cast in very political terms, even to its roots in Enlightenment thought. Anna Mae Duane cites the origins of the modern Western institution of childhood in the philosophy of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. According to Duane, “the child has long served as the model for progress – from savagery to civilization, from murky past to fully realized present.”Footnote ²³ For Duane, the figure of the child since the Enlightenment has been a chaotic and wild creature that needs to be managed and directed into adulthood – often an analogy for the civilizing mission. According to Duane, the “child is also at the same time the future citizen, whose role as a state subject is created and projected in the lessons he or she learns, lessons that adhere to certain beliefs about race, gender, and class.”Footnote ²⁴ Similarly, political scientist Barbara Arneil argues that in Enlightenment-era Western social-contract theory, children are not so much “beings” as they are “becomings,”Footnote ²⁵ in the sense that a child's upbringing must be managed in such a way as to create a rational adult citizen who has earned the political right to thoughtful participation in society and governance. Thus the figure of the child represents the inherent difficulties in managing human nature but also the concerns over what values will be projected into future generations through participatory politics.

But the figure of the child took an even more central role in the US from its youth. Caroline Levander argues that the nascence and development of the modern institution of childhood was approximately contemporary to that of the US, and as such the figure of the child became inextricably bound up with American ideals in such a way that childhood came to represent an ideal (and racialized) purity of US national belonging, one that needed to be protected.Footnote ²⁶ In this sense, the management of the child is related to ideas of nativist purity, and the impulse to protect the child is often used as a placeholder for the protection of the nation-state, in both philosophical and administrative terms. Similarly, queer theorist Lee Edelman argues that contemporary US politics, both conservative and progressive, often demonstrate a logic of reproductive futurity as a rhetorical model and justification for action; for Edelman, this is emblematized by the image of the child who needs protecting, or, as he describes it in more jarring language, “the fascism of the baby's face.”Footnote ²⁷

Thus it should come as no surprise that the age of political capacity has been an important point in discourse and legislation around voting rights in the US throughout its history. The US Constitution originally made no specific rules for voting age requirements but referred the matter to state governments, which generally allowed only property-owning men enfranchisement. However, in the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth, an array of political and social forces drove voting reform which largely established the age of twenty-one as the qualification for white men to vote, regardless of religion or property.Footnote ²⁸ And since, as I have noted above, in Western philosophy the management of childhood was meant to create fully fledged political creatures, this left people without the right to vote eternally childlike. According to Corinne Field, voting inequality led to the persistent infantilization of women and black men in American culture, yes, but it also conversely allowed women and black suffrage activists a shared argument for expanding the franchise from the perspective of who was allowed to become an adult and at what age that could happen.Footnote ²⁹ Thus, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920 and all citizens were allowed to vote at twenty-one regardless of sex,Footnote ³⁰ American women were, in a manner of speaking, finally permitted to grow up.

THE NEW WOMAN

The achievement of voting rights was not an isolated event; suffrage activists were just one part of a broader women's movement – labelled the “New Woman” – comprising many different groups advocating for more agency for women in various ways. According to Martha Patterson, the New Woman encapsulated a broad set of activists and agitators, such as the “suffragist, progressive reformist, prohibitionist, or flapper,” who each in her own way “demanded a public voice and private fulfillment through work, education, and political engagement.”Footnote ³¹ Through the end of the nineteenth century and into the beginning of the twentieth, women worked for and achieved increased opportunities in education, work, and politics, as well as more agency in decisions related to sexuality, marriage, family, and reproduction, and these changes were one of the hallmarks of twentieth-century US development. Indeed, the New Woman was “a telling marker, a symbol, of modernity itself.”Footnote ³²

In many ways, the 1920s represents the starkest shift in women's roles, and much of this change – and the anxieties surrounding it – were focussed on increasing sexual liberty. Lynn Dumenil argues that not only “entry into the public arena through participation in politics and an expanded presence in the workplace” but also “[c]hanging sexual mores … set the stage for a new conception of womanhood.”Footnote ³³ Similarly, John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman note that the 1920s “stand out as a time when something in the sexual landscape decisively altered and new patterns clearly emerged.”Footnote ³⁴ D'Emilio and Freedman argue that American society in the period was developing towards a model of “sexual liberalism” in which the object of sex is primarily pleasure rather than reproduction, and in which young people were freer to experiment with sex outside marriage.Footnote ³⁵ While men and boys had always enjoyed at least a degree of sexual liberty compared with women and girls, this was newfound territory for women, and much of the public anxiety over sexuality was focussed around the dangers of sexuality to and from young women.

All in all, popular thought about girlhood in the 1920s represented an irresolvable tension, in that girls represented both hope for an orderly future and anxiety over unmanageable sexuality. In this sense, it is no surprise that the reading public developed a voracious interest in the interiority of girls that spurred the market for girls’ writing. In the most detailed overview of this craze for child writing, David Sadler explains, “These books were published, for the most part, not because they would be read by children but because they would appeal to an adult audience.”Footnote ³⁶ To put it another way, as Juliet McMaster argues, “child writers, by and large, are busy writing ‘Adults’ Literature.”Footnote ³⁷ In effect, young authors like Crane are attempting to write as adults do, using the voice and forms that have been seen in more “grown-up” books. For McMaster, however, this is not just a matter of form or voice; child authors, some from this period, often take on specifically sexual content – by turns either charming or discomfiting adult readers. Cathryn Halverson, focussing in particular on this group of girl writers, argues that this precocious sexuality is actually what generated a readership: “Interest in the interiority and sexuality of young women … led to an interest in the interiority and incipient sexuality of little girls.”Footnote ³⁸ According to Halverson, adult readers were fascinated by suggestions of burgeoning sexuality: “Even as they extolled the purity of little girlhood, readers often searched girls’ texts for signs of incipient sexuality.”Footnote ³⁹ Thus Crane and other girl writers of the period offered a window into the minds of the next generation of women, but as these girls investigated the boundaries of what is proper for girls and women in terms of love and sex, some readers did not like what they found.

THE JANITOR'S BOY

At first, Crane's parents took little notice of her writing, until one day she loudly bemoaned the loss of her first writings when her mother mistakenly threw them out.Footnote ⁴⁰ When she eventually shared her work with her parents, they were quickly convinced, as perhaps most parents would be, that she was exceedingly talented, and submitted her work to local newspapers. Crane quickly published poems in The Sun and the New York Evening Post. Readers’ interest in her poetry was growing steadily when reporters began profiling her for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. And it was this paper that would be her greatest source of publicity – both positive and negative. In the pages that follow, I will discuss Crane's early work and reception up to and following the publication of The Janitor's Boy to show how her work (as well as some of her publicity), though focussed on childhood games and play, evokes a subversion of gender roles and expectations.

Founded in 1841 and operating until 1955, the Eagle was no small neighborhood newsletter. Today, the paper is primarily remembered for the fact that poet Walt Whitman served as editor for a short time, but during the Civil War the paper enjoyed the highest readership of any afternoon paper in the country. Further, throughout its lifetime, writers for the Eagle garnered no less than four Pulitzer Prizes.Footnote ⁴¹ The first articles about Crane began to appear in the Eagle in 1923, about two years before the publication of The Janitor's Boy. Even at this early stage, Crane had already written the title poem of the collection – then titled “Romance” – which is quoted in one of the Eagle's first articles on the young writer. According to the article, Crane read – ravenously consumed, to be more precise – the poetry of Rudyard Kipling, at once enjoying the work but also breaking it down into its components, which “appeared to consist, she found, of an idea, some rhymes, and a snappy meter.”Footnote ⁴² From there she decided frankly, “if Kipling could do it then I could, too.”Footnote ⁴³

The writer of this first article is not credited but is likely the work of a young reporter named Nunnally Johnson,Footnote ⁴⁴ whose wry writing style eventually earned him his own column at the Eagle, “One Word after Another,” which was a humorous, sometimes satirical, feature focussing on current events. On receiving some of her poems, Johnson was immediately taken with Crane's verse, as were his readers. Johnson must have quickly had a sense of young Crane's marketability, for in 1923 (about a month after the first article) he authored a full-page spread devoted to the young poet, complete with snippets of her poetry and fanciful illustrations of her and her young friend who was the real-life inspiration for the title of her first collection. Indeed, the article is a profile not just of Crane, but also of her crush Roger, son of her apartment building's janitor and maintenance man: “Nathalia, though only 9 years old, is extraordinarily articulate. Roger, though a little older, is absolutely inarticulate.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Combined with the verses and pictures, Johnson's sympathetic humor and Crane's adorable precocity create the perfect puff piece, and he predicts her complete success: “Some day Miss Nathalia Crane is going to be famous.”Footnote ⁴⁶

And yet, while the article is clearly written simply to be cute, a subversion of gender expectations quickly becomes the central focus of the article as Johnson compares Roger to another object of love poetry – Shakespeare's Dark Lady:

Thus, even at this early stage, journalists were framing Crane and her work as tacitly undermining gender roles.

Indeed, the language of gender subversion suits Crane's work, which revolves around a young girl who fashions her identity by playing out adult desires of love and romance with a neighborhood boy. “Oh I'm in love with the janitor's boy, / And the janitor's boy loves me,” begins the first and titular poem of Crane's first volume, The Janitor's Boy.Footnote ⁴⁸ In these lines Crane introduces the theme of childhood romance that dominates the first seven poems of the book and in some ways defines the whole collection. The speaker is, like Crane herself, a young girl, who, like Crane again, is infatuated with the young son of her apartment building's custodian. Theirs is a love affair grounded in childhood fantasy and play: “He's going to hunt for a desert isle / In our geography.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The island escape they seek would need to be near their Brooklyn neighborhood:

Indeed, though the poem imagines a romantic desert isle utopia, the actual spaces where the two children spend their days are in and around a New York City borough apartment building. The fact that the speaker's love interest is known by his father's occupation is significant as well, as it denotes that he, and likely the speaker, are of the working class. Their flights of fancy, then, make use of their urban surroundings while also imagining an escape from them as the young man busies himself “making a raft / Out of an old settee.”Footnote ⁵¹ Once their fantasy ship is created, they will sail away together:

In all the poems in this sequence, the children's parents are only mentioned indirectly and never actually appear as characters. Here, the speaker is running away with a young man, an occurrence that absolutely terrifies her parents, so she leaves a note rather than bring it up verbally. In this sense, the speaker deliberately avoids her parents but couches it in a humorous tone of not wanting to bother them by interrupting them to tell them that she is leaving.

While for the most part this poem evokes a playfulness – suiting the somewhat comic and somewhat romantic tone of the poem's narrative – it also harbors a more adult desire. For the speaker's fantasy does not end at merely sailing away:

Here the swashbuckling shenanigans of the speaker's adventurous hero take on a decidedly sexual connotation. Much like a pirate scoundrel from a more adult romance, the speaker imagines Roger taking her to bed. The sexual subtext of this poem did not, however, scandalize critics and readers. Dozens of newspapers across the country quoted either this stanza or the entire poem, but not a single journalist addressed the content of this line at all. This is significant – and surprising – given the intense scrutiny over sexuality in poems from her second collection, Lava Lane. Joan Shelley Rubin, discussing this particular passage, argues that the way Crane was described – in terms of “wholesome girlhood” – framed her in a way that “could alleviate anxieties about the power and pervasiveness of sexual impulses by permitting readers to regard her poems as ‘pranks’ emanating from her ‘elfin’ personality.”Footnote ⁵⁴ In this sense, the implications of the distinctly sexual connotation of the lines are defused by the innocence and naivety of its author. Indeed, in the first profile of Crane – prominently printing the whole of “The Janitor's Boy” – Johnson describes Crane specifically in terms of wholesome girlhood: “There is a dainty flavor, a naivete, a directness, in her love songs that give them a distinctive spirit. And with this singularity, a practicality, a prim little recognition of earthly limitations, that is quite feminine.”Footnote ⁵⁵ It is that sense of naivety that neutralizes the sexual undertones for the readers.

Indeed, this perception of naivety is key to understanding this fad for literature by girls. Sadler notes, “What adults seemed to prize was the direct access to the childish imagination” characterized by “the pure freshness of unspoiled hearts and minds.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Indeed, Untermeyer, in an essay on Hilda Conkling, another of the girl poets of the era, describes her child mind as offering “a directness of perception, an almost mystic divination” of an “emotional primitive, still free of superimposed patterns” of thought, who drew the material of her poetry “directly from the unconscious. The child knows beyond knowledge, tapping that vast source of intuitive wisdom.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Or as contemporary poet Amy Lowell writes in her preface to Conkling's collection: “Hilda is subconscious, not self-conscious.”Footnote ⁵⁸ In the exemplary child writer of this type, there is no consciousness of creation or labor of craft; the writing is but a transparent and unmediated window into a child's perspective, which is characterized by a naive innocence.

And at the beginning of her career, Crane's public persona was presented in this way, as an ordinary but technically proficient girl whose precocious abilities allowed adult readers access to an essentially average girl's mind. As Johnson notes in a preface to her first collection,

Similarly, the posed photograph in the frontispiece of the collection shows a pointedly ordinary girl with a delicate stature and a neat black bob seated with a child's picture book open in her lap (when in reality she read the dictionary for pleasure); her gaze is directed at the camera but the dreamy expression in her dark eyes suggests that her mind is elsewhere. In newspaper profiles, too, she was described as an imaginative child, to be sure, but one with the same preoccupations and annoyances of any girl her age: she played with the other children, had crushes on boys, and struggled with schoolwork – particularly math – as any child might.Footnote ⁶⁰

But even in her early work there is a self-consciousness in the Janitor's Boy poems, as the speaker continues to play out adult behavior learned from popular literature. In a poem later in the sequence, the young speaker contemplates her emotions on a moonlit night on “The Flathouse Roof.” The poem finds her under the starry sky following an encounter with her beloved Roger: “He loves me, for he said it when we met upon the stair, / And that is why I'm on the roof to get a breath of air.”Footnote ⁶¹ Roger's confession of love leaves her breathless and casts the world anew in a romantic light: “I linger on the flathouse roof, the moonlight is divine. / But my heart is a-flutter like the washing on the line.”Footnote ⁶² Her attitude in the poem is pointedly poetic, and she intends it to be: “I long to be a heroine, I long to be serene, / But my feet, they dance in answer to a distant tambourine.”Footnote ⁶³ In a sense, the speaker sees herself as a poetic speaker. In many ways, she is reenacting scripts learned through love poetry. At the same time, the sense of the poetic overtakes her quotidian, working-class surroundings. Just as the flapping of laundry on a line becomes her fluttering heartbeat in love, young Roger's work in the basement becomes the meter for her poem:

In this sense, the poem becomes about love, yes, but more about overlaying a poetic narrative on top of everyday events to create a sense of romance.

Though the speaker of the “Janitor's Boy” sequence is clearly inspired by her own experience, it would be a mistake to read the speaker as Crane. One clue to this is the voice in which Crane writes the poems, or, to be more precise, the accent. For example, in “The Flathouse Roof,” one of the couplets rhymes the words “saw” and “floor.”Footnote ⁶⁵ This would be, at best, a slant rhyme, unless you read it in a strong Brooklyn accent. But this accent does not hold through all the poems in the collection. In “The Battle on the Floor,” a later poem in the same collection that is not part of the “Janitor's Boy” sequence, “floor” is rhymed with “war” and similar exact rhymes with “floor” appear in two additional poems in the collection.Footnote ⁶⁶ In this way, Crane tailors her speakers’ voices to the content of the poem. But more than just skillful word choice, Crane writes poems from an autobiographical perspective that are, in fact, persona poems with a constructed speaker. Thus, on one level, The Janitor's Boy demonstrates playing out normative heterosexual scripts for behavior, but at the same time it demonstrates her understanding of how voice can be used to construct the self; that is, voice is agency.

LAVA LANE

Unfortunately, Crane's immediate success would gradually give way to suspicious criticism as her poetic style developed and as she focussed on less childlike topics. In 1925, now just twelve years old, Crane published her second volume of poetry, Lava Lane. By this time, The Janitor's Boy had gone through several printings and had sold over 60,000 copies.Footnote ⁶⁷ Lava Lane sold well immediately – but not to the degree of The Janitor's Boy – and enjoyed positive reviews. While Lava Lane has some poems about childhood issues – and at least one more featuring her red-headed Roger – the collection generally foregrounds a much different style, with increasingly esoteric vocabulary and allusions. For example, the titular poem is about nothing less than the entire cosmological history of our planet. “Lava Lane” begins,

The language is dense and terms like “cicatrix” might require even the most literate reader to consult a dictionary. Also the content, which Johnson explains is “the nebular hypothesis” of “Laplace's theory of the beginnings of matter,” is much beyond her grade level, to be sure.Footnote ⁶⁹

But more than the increasing conceptual complexity of her work, readers and critics were troubled by the more explicitly sexual content of some her new poems. For instance, the Eagle printed an abridged version of Crane's poem “The First Reformer” as part of an article debating the authenticity of Crane's authorship. The poem is headlined with the phrase “One of the Poems That Nathalia's Critics Say Child Could Not Write.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The poem details, like “Lava Lane,” a distant geological period:

The text hearkens back to a period before blossoms fully exposed their beauty, and like women, they wore clothes. But, ultimately, the weather necessitates a change: “No arrogance of modesty – The time was all too hot.”Footnote ⁷² Since the flowers were in their own company – essentially a group of women – they all begin to disrobe:

The flowers’ private nudity is disturbed, however, when an errant male hummingbird stumbles upon their freedom. The flowers are distinctly embarrassed to find themselves naked before the male bird, but

On a scientific level, nakedness is an accurate metaphor. In effect, unlike people who hide their reproductive organs with clothing, plants put them on display. In fact, they broadcast them with bright colors and sumptuous shapes in order to lure pollinators, like hummingbirds, to the sex organs of the plant so that they can aid in reproduction. Of course, Crane's personification of the flowers as women tearing off their dresses surely carries with it implications of sexual liberation on a human level as well.

And soon Crane was under attack. The Eagle – Crane's early supporter – was in particular quick to report misgivings about Crane's authorship following the release of her new collection. A November front-page article notes, “When Nathalia's second book was brought out this autumn skeptics as to the authenticity of the two books almost came to blows with believers and editors and publishers found themselves arguing with heat, ‘Nathalia did, Nathalia didn't.’”Footnote ⁷⁵ The Eagle seems to side with the doubters, citing a hypothetical critic: “‘How is it possible,’ asked many readers of the book, frankly puzzled, ‘for a child who has only gone to school for three years, a child neither of whose parents has ever gone to college, to know so much.’”Footnote ⁷⁶ The question obviously betrays a classist prejudice, but the reporter's doubt also highlights preconceived notions of just how much a child ought not to know about certain things.

As Sadler notes, Crane was “attacked” by critics specifically “because she was not childlike enough … She was throwing away all the advantages of childhood and choosing instead to enter the adult world, making it impossible to regard her as an artless child revealing the delightful innocence of an unspoiled mind.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Instead of offering an unmediated and unself-conscious vision of innocence, she turned a critical eye on adult themes. Crane was not, however, the only girl writer of the period to face this mistrust on account of knowing too much, specifically about romance and sexuality. According to McMaster, Daisy Ashford faced the same derision and suspicion “undoubtedly fuelled by adult convictions that only adults could or should write about sex and love.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Indeed, McMaster points out that this betrays a strange contradiction that critics can believe a girl to be able to create a sophisticated literary work but simply cannot accept an awareness of sexuality: “What they pounce on for incredulity is how much she knows” about inappropriate topics.Footnote ⁷⁹ Indeed, no one seemed to suspect Crane's first book, even though it evidenced strong verse capabilities and nuanced understandings of poetic voice, but when she writes more directly about issues of sexuality critics take note.

However, it was not so much that the Eagle was siding with skeptics, but rather that the newspaper was the source of this initial doubt – the paper created the skepticism and was seeking to fuel suspicion of a hoax. The following day, the paper featured another front-page article on Crane, headlined “Nathalia Crane's Poems Puzzle Teachers after Noting Her Class Work,” which quoted a few unnamed teachers at the public schools Crane attended, who gave detailed résumé of Crane's academic life to date, including even, disturbingly, her IQ score. One teacher claims, “The entire staff of teachers at the school is skeptical about the alleged genius of Nathalia Crane.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Another teacher, having been told that some of her poems are “extremely vulgar,” denies that Crane could have any such content. Indeed, one notes, “I would prefer not to think that she did know some of the things indicated in her poems and that she did not have the kind of thoughts that must have been necessary to write some of the poems attributed to this gentle child.”Footnote ⁸¹ Again, doubts about Crane were fueled not by her prodigious abilities but by her precocious knowledge.

A few days later, the paper enlisted Edwin Markham, poet and honorary president of the Poetry Society of America, in its attempts to unmask a perceived hoax. Markham was suspicious of the girl's success not because he did not like her work, but because he thought it was just too intelligent: “The sophisticated viewpoint of sex and on life, the special knowledge of history and archaeology found in these pages, place them beyond the reach of any juvenile mind.”Footnote ⁸² Who, then, might have written the poems? For Markham, “Unquestionably the whole thing is a genial hoax, fabricated perhaps by four young women and two young men while lingering over the wine and walnuts – all of them distinguished poets, with dexterous pens, and all determined to break the monotony, of the hour with this delectable deception.”Footnote ⁸³ Surely, Markham thought, the work must have been the result of a group effort by such major poets as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Stephen Vincent Benet (who wrote an introduction to Crane's first collection), and several others.

This would mark a contradictory time in which the Eagle was both supporting and attacking Crane, depending upon the author. According to a 1926 article by Johnson, whose support of Crane was unwavering and who was clearly angered by the pointed attack on Crane's credibility, the Eagle's change in perspective on Crane's writing began when an unnamed reporter and the editor of the children's section brought misgivings to the managing editor of the paper, Harris M. Crist,Footnote ⁸⁴ an “irascible and electrifying” figure known as a “crusader” driven by his own sense of “righteous anger.”Footnote ⁸⁵ This is not to say, however, that he was liked. According to Schroth, “Crist was remembered for his immaculate attire, his pince-nez glasses, his magnificent white hair, and ruddy complexion, but he was not remembered for his good disposition.”Footnote ⁸⁶ In an interview later in life, Johnson notes,

Johnson even goes so far as to state that this conflict is what made him leave the Eagle. Johnson's criticism is not simply of their treatment of Crane in general but of a perceived prejudice that lay under it. Indeed, Johnson claims that these three figures at the Eagle specifically doubted Crane's authorship because of her mother's Jewish heritage and that they had speculated in a meeting that it was some kind of a “gigantic Jewish plot.”Footnote ⁸⁸ While it is impossible to verify Johnson's claim, Schroth too notes that Crist had a reputation for specifically racist and anti-Semitic tendencies.Footnote ⁸⁹

Regardless of the motives behind the Eagle's organized attack on Crane, the paper would publish a barrage of articles discussing Crane and her supposed inability to write such poetry. One such article, by Clement Wood, utilized contemporary interest in psychoanalysis to cast aspersions on Crane's work.

Though the article title introduces Wood as a psychoanalyst, he would be more accurately described as a writer. Per Johnson, Wood, who was “generally known as a poet and critic, approached the Eagle in the guise of an amateur psycho-analyst and wrote two lengthy discussions of Nathalia's works from the point of view of one capable of piercing the subconscious mind.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Although it was through writing poetry that Wood gained the most cultural capital, it was a different kind of writing that earned him the most money. Writing for the Little Blue Book series published by Julius-Halderman, Wood was the most popular author, penning some fifty-seven titles that sold almost five million copies in total.Footnote ⁹¹ The topics of the little books ranged enormously, containing everything from reprints of classic literature to contemporary how-to instructions, entertaining glosses on historical events and periods, and even socialist manifestos. Wood's most successful issues revolved around titillating topics that sometimes utilized psychoanalysis: The Art of Kissing (selling 257,500 copies), Modern Sexual Morality (164,500), and Sex in Psychoanalysis (118,500).Footnote ⁹² In this sense, we could describe Wood's expertise in psychoanalysis as a kind of a popular mouthpiece to a lay audience – and, indeed, some of the readers of the Eagle would recognize Wood's name in this context.

Wood's pseudo-psychoanalytic article on Crane is a long one, beginning on the front page and taking up almost an entire page later in an issue. Wood's psychological analysis takes the form of “an investigation of the poems themselves, in the light of modern psychology.”Footnote ⁹³ Wood argues, through his textual analysis, “If she created them herself, she is a precocity in sophistication, in literary technique, knowledge, sexual attitudes, [and] mature irreverence.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Rather than accepting that Crane could be a genius of “sexual attitudes,” Wood firmly states that Crane's father Clarence must have been involved. Either Clarence wrote the poems himself or, “If Nathalia wrote them, she was as much under the spell of her father as if she were a second Trilby, he a later Svengali.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Ultimately, Wood claims that it could only be a case of plagiarism or sinister mesmerism between father and daughter, which, given the Freudian posturing of the article, harbors a potentially dark subtext.

In the next day's issue, the Eagle published another article on the relationship between Crane and her father, authored by Gloria Goddard, a professional writer of nonfiction, novels, and poetry and who was, not coincidentally, married to Wood. Like her husband, Goddard too wrote many pamphlets in the Little Blue Book series, some coauthored with Wood and many more with her as sole author credited. Hers were often directed to a female audience, with titles like Confidential Chats with Wives, Marital Discords and How to Avoid Them, and How to Make Sandwiches and Box Lunches. In a sense, then, one of her specialties in informative writing was the domestic sphere. And in her article, “Nathalia Crane's Father Dominating Influence in Child Poet's Life,” she uses this skill to create a profile of Clarence at home, with Crane and her mother in the background. Goddard presents Clarence as a man “who would attract attention in any gathering,” with a fidgety manner and talkative demeanor, who “kept up a running flow of conversation” and “only by interrupting him [did she] get in a few questions to the child.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Indeed, in what is listed as the first interview question, Goddard asks Crane which Sunday school she attends, to which Crane replies quite simply: none. It is a question surely designed to dismay readers. Here Clarence tries to clarify:

As such, Goddard, curious as to how Crane developed an understanding of biblical stories sufficient to allude to them in her poetry, asks Crane if she reads the Bible and if she believes the stories it offers – citing Crane's poem from Lava Lane “The Warming Pan,” which was an ode to Abishag, a young woman whose story is detailed in the book of I Kings. Crane responds to her question by explaining that she does not necessarily believe in the veracity of the stories per se and that she believes in God but not in Christ as such. Goddard, seemingly shocked, presses her for more information, to which Crane explains that she thinks of Jesus as “a beautiful poet.”Footnote ⁹⁸ The quick exchange, in which Crane offers articulate answers to delicate questions, draws an immediate interruption and corrective from her mother – who surely understands the stakes of Goddard's questions – and a chuckling word of warning from her father “to be careful else she'd have the Klan after them; then, as though to himself, he said he didn't care.”Footnote ⁹⁹ But if Johnson was correct in his assertion that the Eagle's treatment of Crane was rooted in anti-Semitism, then surely Goddard's pointed questions about Sunday school and Jesus qualify as a trap. Ultimately, Goddard crafts the article as a conservative critique of Clarence as a kind of Svengali whose intense personality was essentially using young Crane as a proxy for his progressive ideas.

Thus, though Goddard positions the article as an attempted interview of Crane, she focusses particularly on Clarence and his unconventional ideas. For Goddard, Clarence's “most interesting point of view concerned women.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Goddard explains:

And he notes that he has indeed shared these ideas with Crane. His philosophy on gender does interestingly conform to the subtext of “The Warming Pan,” one of Crane's most sexually suggestive poems and the one that Goddard mentioned. Goddard closes the article with pointed derision, recalling Crane's poetry: “The books contain poems to women who went unclothed, but none to the great women of history.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Given the themes of disempowered or forgotten women in both Crane's poetry and Clarence's philosophy, it is ironic – but not surprising – that one woman involved in this story was consistently ignored: Crane's mother. Did any who suspected Crane's work was a hoax suppose that her mother might have been the Svengali? The answer, it would seem, is simply no. In most articles, as in Goddard's, Crane's mother Nelda is a background character. Even Johnson, one of the Crane family's greatest supporters, is ambivalent in his description of her: “Nathalia's mother does not, alas, contribute greatly to her omnivorous child's appetite for facts and words.”Footnote ¹⁰³ According to Johnson, Nelda is a “vivid young woman” still in her twenties, who, he notes, dropped out of high school to marry Crane's father. While Johnson attempts a little of the mythologizing he provided for Clarence – for instance, he highlights the fact that Nelda was descended from the early modern Portuguese Jewish philosopher and political figure Isaac ben Judah Abarbanel – his overall portrait of Crane's mother is that of a silly young woman. According to Johnson, she was a “somewhat impractical person” who resolved to sell her beloved daughter's work but did so in a relatively inefficient manner:

Though taxicabs may not have been the most cost-effective means of transportation, Crane was ultimately successful based on her early newspaper publication, so her mother's excursions certainly resulted in tangible benefits that would resound throughout Crane's lifetime. Indeed, the uneven descriptions of Crane's father and mother – even in this article by a staunch supporter – reflect the unequal gender dynamic that also shadowed Crane's literary career.

Though Goddard and other critics clearly detested “The Warming Pan,” the poem is quite representative of Crane's gender politics in Lava Lane. In the poem, Crane rewrites Judeo-Christian history by recasting a woman in the background of a biblical story as a fully sexualized heroine. The poem focusses on a brief biblical story about King David, who was at that time well advanced in old age. According to the account, the elderly king had become cold and could not warm himself again, and the solution – apparently a time-honored tradition – was to find the most beautiful young virgin in the kingdom to care for him, including sleeping in his bed at night to warm him, although, as the book assures, the venerable king did not have sex with her. Abishag is really only mentioned in a few verses and is essentially a background character, a servant with a very limited role in the royal court.

Crane's poem, though, focusses entirely on the young woman and questions the scope of her importance in the kingdom. In this first stanza Crane introduces the venerable king and Abishag – who remains unnamed until the final stanza – with a light, somewhat comic tone:

The girl is, to be sure, intimidated by the most powerful man in the kingdom. But, in Crane's hands, the lordly David fades into the background of the story:

She is used in a tradition that is one of their oldest. But even given the credibility of this custom, the speaker highlights the ridiculousness of the story:

First of all, the humorous tone of the speaker casts doubt on the claim that Abishag was only meant to warm the king by sleeping with him and, in so doing, casts doubt on the claim that the relationship between David and Abishag was not sexual. Also, this stanza makes clear the titular comparison: Abishag is a mere “warming pan” for the king, traditionally a metal object that could be loaded with hot coals used to warm a bed. In this sense, she is still completely objectified by the tradition insofar as her worth is completely tied up in her body. But even so, Abishag gains a kind of regal bearing beyond her station:

Following this line, the poem breaks here between stanzas with a series of asterisks, which cleverly suggests an omission, as though certain stanzas describing what happened after she entered the king's bedchamber are excised from the poem.

In the final two stanzas, the speaker ponders what makes someone a legitimately heroic biblical figure, alluding to the prophet Joshua's miraculous ability to stop the sun in the sky for a full day during the Battle of Ajalon and the Queen of Sheba's extravagant journey to meet with and test King Solomon's storied wisdom. In this sense, biblical stories prioritize miracles and intellect but give short shrift to those, like Abishag, whose heroics are rooted in an expression of sexuality:

Though Abishag's name is largely forgotten, her fame is still somehow certain; it marks a contradiction that is central to the poem. Abishag becomes a powerful woman through a sexual relationship, but, because it is sexual, her important role in the kingdom is diminished, and she is pushed into the background. But in the development in the poem, she moves from being a mere “warming pan” – an object – to an individual with a name – a subject with agency – through her sexuality. Ultimately, the poem seeks to recover and exalt the role of female sexuality in places where it is effectively repressed or rendered powerless. In this sense, Lava Lane has a particular thematic project in mind: mythologizing contemporary scientific progress – as in “Lava Lane” – while recovering foundational religious or mythological stories and figures with an eye to radically equalizing men and women, in often sexual terms.

Really, the only “evidence” the Eagle had of a swindle was the content of her poetry. Crane's family and closest associates – like Johnson, Untermeyer, and his wife, poet Jean Starr Untermeyer – were firm in their support of Crane and gave the same descriptions of the girl browsing the dictionary and tapping out words and phrases to a rhythm before writing them down on the family typewriter. Even so, staff at the Eagle labored to find scientific evidence of a hoax and offered, more than once, to stage a psychological examination “by a group of experts, including Dr. A. A. Brill, psychoanalyst and the foremost American exponent of Freudian psychology; Angelo Patri, expert in child psychology, and Prof. Hervey Allan, professor of poetry at Columbia University.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Eventually, the Eagle's battle with Crane reached a national audience when the debacle was reported the pages of Time magazine. Ultimately, as Time magazine reported, one bold newspaperman – Johnson states that it was Crist himself – asked that Crane spontaneously compose a verse for evidence of her poetic prowess.Footnote ¹¹¹ When she was able to recite a stanza that she had been working on from memory, most investigators – including Time – were convinced of her genuineness.Footnote ¹¹² Indeed, Time offers this as a conclusion, essentially confirming Crane not as a cheat but as a prodigy.

This convocation of the title “prodigy” is a mixed blessing, however, since such young minds are often met with intense, ambivalent, or even negative emotional responses from the general public. David Feldman and Lynn Goldsmith note, “Child prodigies are still perceived as unexplained and somehow unnatural occurrences, and they have been greeted over the generations with an ambivalent mix of emotions that accompany the expectation of change: fear and wariness, mystery and myth, skepticism and contempt, awe and wonder.”Footnote ¹¹³ A child like Crane who can outperform adults in such a prestigious field as traditional verse poetry and who also shines a light on inequality in contemporary society completely upends accepted ideas of the natural order of human development and the clear division between child and adult.

EPILOGUE AND CONCLUSION

While there is not a clear end point to Crane's struggle with controversy, Time's write-up, as well as a behind-the-scenes account written by an indignant Johnson in the pages of the American Mercury, show a shift away from attacks on Crane's credibility. Ultimately, the Eagle would pull back on its quest to unmask the hoax, and the furor around Crane would die down, though periodically the Eagle would briefly reinstate its claims as Crane published new work. Regardless, such notoriety at a young age can often lead to a decline or even tragedy in adulthood, but fortunately Crane's later years were largely peaceful and successful. Indeed, though Crane's battle with the press must surely have taken its toll on her and her family, it was not without its long-term benefits. Her notoriety led to a scholarship to an exclusive private school and then later contributed to another scholarship to Barnard College. She continued writing and publishing poetry in her adulthood – though much less of it and certainly to less fanfare. Ultimately, Crane embarked on a decades-long career teaching literature (of course) at San Diego State University.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Crane's work as a girl writer of modern poetry emphasizes the changing roles of girls and women in US society in the 1920s, while her reception underscores the vicissitudes of public sentiment around women and girls and their intellectual abilities. Her voice is strong and engaging, and her ability to construct traditional verse poetry is surely beyond that of most adults. Yet her voice is almost lost amongst so much discussion and debate by various adults – mostly men. It demonstrates a discomfort, or even outright fear, of the proverbial wisdom from the mouths of babes. In this period, girls became an emblem for the changing status of women, and given the content of her poetry, Crane was surely aware of the shifting perceptions of femininity. This is reflected in her poems in the “Janitor's Boy” sequence, in the way she subverts gender roles by emphasizing the way girls self-consciously fashion their gender identities via learned scripts of romantic love. It is further demonstrated in her work in Lava Lane, where she crafts a new historical mythology that acknowledges the capabilities and sexualities of forgotten women. Indeed, working within a few years of a period in which women first gained direct political agency, it is hardly surprising that her focus is on the social roles of girls and the repression of women throughout history. But as her depictions of women's sexuality became increasingly hard to dismiss as childish fancy, adult readers began to cry foul.

Ultimately, though it might have been acceptable to believe a girl could write at or beyond adult level when she writes about girlish games like playing house, when she writes about women's sexual agency, she clearly crosses a line. But in truth, the line was on the move. Here we can recall the interview question that Johnson posed to Crane about whether she would be a famous poet or marry rich. She chooses a successful public career that will allow her to choose whatever private life she desires. Readers might have found this comment humorous, but it was simply the truth, and it represented a foundational shift in girls’ perceptions of their possible futures that still resonates today. Young women were becoming agents of political and social change in a way that they never had been before, and, to the dismay of some grown-ups, these girls were already ready for the task of creating a more female future.