"To the kid with the book; everywhere."

[tilivenn]

A few months ago I started thinking about the fictional trope of the bookish little girl. This seems to be a pretty frequent type of protagonist: Marcie in Finder: Talisman started these thoughts for me, and I quickly moved from her to Matilda, Jo from Little Women, etc. I have a really strong sense of this as type, something of which I ought to be

Comments

[maverick_weirdo]

My first thoughts were of the books "A Wrinkle in Time" and "Tuck Everlasting" but I'm not sure the girls in those books were just precocious or were actually bookish.

[rushthatspeaks]

Meg in A Wrinkle in Time is a different and rarer character: her affinities are for math and science, and she's explicitly terrible at English.

The archetype does feel as though it ought to come up all the time, but scanning my shelves does not produce as much as I would have assumed.

I come up with, off the top of my head at four in the morning: Flora, from Ysabeau Wilce's YA series starting with Flora Segunda (Flora has a deep and intimate acquaintance with the pulp novel, which is both useful to her and not, and plot-relevant on multiple occasions); Lirael from Garth Nix's Lirael, if I recall correctly, but I only read that book once years ago; and in the first chapters of Mercedes Lackey's seminal-yet-terrible Arrows of the Queen Talia is shown explicitly as being different from her repressive religious family because she reads. It doesn't come up much after the early sequence, but the first few pages of that novel are so blatantly that trope as to be pretty much my ur-example of it-- Talia is literally imagining herself in the

[sovay]

Meg in A Wrinkle in Time is a different and rarer character: her affinities are for math and science, and she's explicitly terrible at English.

I ruled out Cloud & Ashes' Margaret for much the same reason. Can we get a third example and make it a genre?

[nineweaving]

Not SF or fantasy, but the eponymous protagonist of Jane Gardam's Bilgewater is quite good at math, science, and chess, and also dyslexic--she never learned to read at all until she was 10 or 11.

Nine

[aliseadae]

Gentian from Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian, and Rosemary!

[winterlime]

Mary Bennet from Pride and Prejudice is perhaps an unflattering example of this. (Though I'm not sure she would be reading novels, as this would have been rather more frivolous.)

[sovay]

A few months ago I started thinking about the fictional trope of the bookish little girl.

Off the top of my head-

Emily in Emily of New Moon (1923) and sequels by L.M. Montgomery? She is a reader who grows up to be a writer, however problematically as the series goes along.

Theo from Doris Egan's The Gate of Ivory (1989) and sequels is an adult example: a folklorist who grew up reading a lot of science fiction and fantasy, which I rather like that the author specifies exists even in a middling-near future with interplanetary travel. This is both useful to her and comes back to bite her several ways, especially in Two-Bit Heroes (1992). Recommended with a slight caveat for several smushed-together kinds of exoticism and the fact that after three books the series stops dead without being a trilogy because the publisher dropped it like a hot rock and in the mid-'90's no one was crowdfunding the rest of their open-ended-with-an-arc novels, but Theo is a person who is aware that her favorite mythological figure is Loki and just what

[tilivenn]

I don't consider Hermione an example of the sort of thing I'm trying to think about here, which is to say, she doesn't really seem to read fiction at all. The junior paper that this is ultimately in the service of will probably focus on metafiction to some degree. What I'm really excited about is the experience of reading fiction about the experience of reading fiction.

[sovay]

I don't consider Hermione an example of the sort of thing I'm trying to think about here, which is to say, she doesn't really seem to read fiction at all.

That's fine: I didn't know if she was a popular enough example of the scholarly girl (however ambivalently the author seems to feel about this quality) that she was worth throwing into the mix. I agree we have no sense of her as a reader of other than nonfiction.

What I'm really excited about is the experience of reading fiction about the experience of reading fiction.

I really feel like I should have YA coming out of my ears on this one and I'm still thinking. The protagonist of Robin McKinley's Beauty (1978)?

[nineweaving]

Why am I coming up with nothing from Diana Wynne Jones?

Milly! The Goddess in love with outworld school stories. I love her.

Nine

[mikevonkorff]

I mentioned these on the internet but I meant them both to refer to animated film instead of written fiction. Luckily, both correspond to written works (though I haven't read the Read or Die manga):

Beauty, by Robin McKinley.
Read or Die, by Hideyuki Kurata.