[In the following review, Gerrard commends Lurie's biographical sketches of various children's writers in Don't Tell the Grown-Ups but faults Lurie's overly-determined, excessively narrow critical approach and analysis.]

“‘There's glory for you!’ ‘I don't know what you mean by “glory”,’ Alice said. ‘I meant, “there's a nice knock-down argument for you!”’ ‘But glory doesn't mean “a nice knock-down argument”,’ Alice objected. ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’”

Children love lifting up stones to discover hidden life, poking in rock pools, hiding in long grass where grown-ups can't see them, making up secret languages, introducing chaos or creating their own rules. Crawl under a table, and it is a house; turn it upside down and it is a boat. And books can turn the world upside down for children or, quantum-like, superimpose another, hidden one. Fantasy, for them, is as real as adult “reality” (there are fairies at the bottom of the garden and lands at the end of a rabbit hole). When Alice in Through the Looking Glass says, “One can't believe impossible things”, the Queen is pitying: “I dare say you haven't had much practice … When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

But this kind of immersion in alternative worlds can be terrifying as well as delightful: indeed, the terror is part of the delight. Narnia, Wonderland and Never-Never Land have an other-life that is also—especially in C. S. Lewis's parables—a kind of death. There is always the fear that the children won't be able to return to the regulated safety of the adult world. Alison Lurie—who is tied to the “subversive” nature of children's literature like a goat on a short tether, nibbling a small area of discussion to baldness but never getting her teeth into wilder thickets—neglects the spine-tingling fears of children's fantasies, while ignoring their complicating layers of meaning.

Her essays [in Don't Tell the Grown-Ups], originally published in the New York Review of Books, are mildly entertaining but tame pieces that roll the magic of Winnie the Pooh or Alice, The Secret Garden or even savage folktales, into neat theses: here, she argues, are “underground” tales that defy or satirise social conventions. Actually, many of them also prop them up: Tolkien (who, in one asinine and baffling paragraph, she presents as a kind of crusty Marxist, implying through his mythologies that “property is theft”) is a real Little Englander in his glorification of the shires. Children might be enchanted by the adult-free spaces of Frances Hodgson Burnett's secret garden, but they also adore the sickly poor-little-rich-girl fantasy of The Little Princess. Children love justice as well as disobedience, familiarity as well as its overthrow, absolutes as well as anarchy. In trying to explain children's literature, Don't Tell the Grown-Ups is a bit like the dragon in The Hobbit—sitting stubbornly on top of a mountain of treasure, counting up the riches without seeing them variously flash and glint.

Lurie is at her best when straightforwardly recounting the lives of some of her chosen authors: a gallery of malcontents, eccentrics, emotional retards and social rebels. Many readers of Beatrix Potter's child-sized, child's-eye-view books will know how she escaped from the prison of her Victorian childhood with the help of a rabbit, drawing and writing her way out of stifling misery. Or how James Barrie, creator of the boy who wouldn't grow up, was himself arrested in permanent adolescence: of stunted growth, with a piping voice, impotent and mother-fixated, he believed that “nothing that happens after we are 12 matters very much”. When his brother died at the age of 14, Barrie tried to console his despairing mother by literally taking on the lost boy's identity. And Peter Pan, with his tribe of Lost Boys, is like a supernatural incarnation of Barrie himself: forever in search of a mother, eternally young in spirit, never growing any older, living underground in what may be the land of the dead.

Other lives are less familiar, though their works still beloved. Kate Greenaway—the painter of idealised pubescent girls who drift through smudged pastoral landscapes and now decorate pretty greeting cards—fits only with extreme difficulty into Lurie's “subversive” pigeon-hole. She seems, rather, to embody, the Victorian cult of the virgin-child that is played out in more ambiguous forms in Peter Pan.

But the relationship between Kate Greenaway and that strange Victorian phenomenon, John Ruskin, is riveting for the light it throws upon an age. Greenaway, a kind, careful, awkward and plain woman of doubtful talent, portrayed a world that her public wanted. Her vision was of an idealised childhood in an idealised pre-industrial England: sweet babies and neurasthenic girls in perfectly-tended, sprigged gardens or on the forever-spring village green. At 60, John Ruskin (who is well-known for falling in love with pre-pubescent girls) also fell feverishly in love with the nymphet charm of Greenaway's “girlies” (his term). For years she kept him supplied with drawings, though resisting his plaintive demands that they should wear fewer or no clothes. Ruskin treated Greenaway's radiant second-rate pastorals like soft-core kiddie porn.

The energetic, hot-tempered and scandalous E. Nesbitt, creator of The Railway Children and other children's classics, is an example of the Other Victorian: a witty, rash, wonderful woman whose books recommended bold socialist solutions, presented a thoroughly modern and startling view of childhood and used magic as a metaphor for the power of the imagination. E. Nesbitt was a lifelong socialist, founder and member of the Fabian society, and supporter of many of the radical causes of the day (including Shakespeare's plays). Married to the businessman Hubert Bland, she tolerated their open marriage and passed off two of his illegitimate children as her own. Her books are informal, unpatronising, scornful of the adult world—and feminist.

Lurie's essay on Nesbitt is one of the best in the book, largely because the vigorous and innovative Nesbitt is well-framed by Lurie's thesis, while Tolkien or T. H. White or A. A. Milne are pinched and squeezed by it. It is curious how inert many of Lurie's essays are—the heavy hand of Lit Crit can balk the most light-hearted and quick-footed magic. Winnie the Pooh and Alice, Bilbo Baggins and Peter Pan are fenced in by these very adult explanations. Pooh is round another corner, Wonderland not here at all.