How to be girl: How the historic juvenilia and contemporary creative writing of young girls can facilitate discussions about what it means to be girl

This research looks at how historic juvenilia can be used in contemporary creative writing workshops with girls of a similar age to the author of said juvenilia, and how the conversation between these texts can facilitate discussions about what it means to be girl. The research questions were: “how do girls creatively (re)write girls and girlhoods?”, “how do girls creatively respond to written portrayals of girlhoods?” and “how can creative writing by girls facilitate thinking about girlhoods?” Qualitative data was gathered through a series of creative writing workshops and follow-up semi-structured interviews with eleven girls aged between seven and eleven years old. Due to the impact of COVID-19, participants were recruited through virtual snowball sampling with their interviews and workshops being held remotely and on a one-to-one basis. The workshops centred upon a story called A Ghost Visits Her Old School which was written by a young author called Bridget Shevlin in 1949. At point of writing, Bridget was a pupil in the upper second at the Bar Convent School in York and these contextual clues suggested that she was approximately ten or eleven years old at time of writing. After discussing A Ghost Visits Her Old School and their ideas about the author, the participants were asked to write their own story in response. Both stories, along with the data from their workshop and interview, were then analysed using grounded theory and thematic coding. The findings showed that being girl was the navigation of a series of complex and often hostile paradoxes, rather than a preoccupation with gender; that historic juvenilia offers a rich and under-utilised resource for creative writing education and discussions about identity; and that working with historic juvenilia can productively destabilise heroic models of girlhood by centring attention upon the more everyday experiences of being girl.