The Whalebone Theatre and Highly Regulated and Overlooked: Women Writers and Child Characters in the Big House

This thesis comprises two components: an extract of The Whalebone Theatre, a novel, and a critical commentary entitled Highly Regulated and Overlooked: Women Writers and Child Characters in the Big House.

The Whalebone Theatre follows one family, the Seagraves, from 1919 to 1944. The main characters are Cristabel, Flossie and Digby, who grow up in a country house in Dorset. They are neglected children who find freedom in books and imagination, which leads to the creation of an open-air theatre from the skeleton of a whale. The novel is divided into five acts and the extract contains Act One and Act Two.

In the critical commentary, I examine my intentions and inspirations for The Whalebone Theatre by studying writers I loved as a child: Lucy M Boston and E Nesbit. I explore Boston and Nesbit’s work with a particular focus on the big house setting, gender roles and childhood reading. I draw upon critical works to examine the interlinked experiences of a child character and a woman writer in negotiating the big house setting, typically a symbol of a dominant patriarchal culture, and reflect upon how my childhood reading shaped my novel.