possibly, but certainly Ruth was a very unliberated heroine by the standards of the next
two decades.
Teenage fiction emerged almost simultaneously with the first soundings of the
women’s liberation movement but it remained unaffected by it for a long time, even
though the majority of novels written at the time were written by women and directed
predominantly at girls.
Honor Arundel’s approach of using the popular romance with some elements of reality
thrown in was similar to K.M.Peyton’s. The books of both were an important bridge
between magazine romance and literary love stories such as Jane Eyre and Wuthering
Heights. Emma, her best known heroine, first appeared in an uncomplicated adventure
Emma’s Island (1968). As an orphan on a remote Scottish island she has all the
qualities necessary for romance and, of course, as she grows up she falls in love. In
Emma in Love (1970) Arundel describes the stages of first joy and then disillusionment
that Emma goes through until she finally recognises that there will be other boys. But
Arundel was well aware that love has its price and she was not afraid of confronting the
issues of sex and even single parenthood, as in The Longest Weekend (1969) in which
Eileen struggles to cope with her 3-year-old daughter and her suffocatingly
‘understanding’ parents.
Good teenage romances have persisted, looking at every possible angle of love and
relationships. But fiction was several years behind the enormous fashion and popular-
music upheavals of the mid-1960s. Reading retained its ‘middle-class’ conservative
image and was in danger of offering very little to anyone other than the committed
reader.
The mid-1970s brought a wave of more hard-hitting novels to Britain. Imports from
liberated Scandinavia, such as Gunnel Beckman’s Mia (1974) and its sequels, talked
openly about sex between teenagers. Bodley Head’s New Adult list on which they
appeared was incredibly controversial at the time and did much to shape the identity of
subsequent teenage fiction. ‘Nice’ stories lost out to novels which gave a less romantic
picture of the realities of contemporary teenage life.
Lynne Reid Banks used her romance My Darling Villain (1977) to tackle parental
control and particularly parents’ views about class head on. Fifteen-year-old Kate, nice
and very middle class, is allowed to give her first adult party, which is gate-crashed by
some less-than-middle-class lads. After the ensuing chaos one of them, Mark, stays
behind to tidy up, and they start going out together: but Mark’s working-class
background is deplored by Kate’s parents. The way in which attitudes about both class
and race are discussed by Lynne Reid Banks makes My Darling Villain—the title itself
gives it awa—a notably dated book but the theme of loving against parental wishes is
perennially popular.
Perhaps the most controversial, at the time of publication at least, was Judy Blume’s
Forever (1975). The joys and disappointments of first love are shown through the story
of Michael and Katherine; more importantly, the joys and disappointments of their first
sexual encounter are described explicitly and easily, making Forever readily accessible
to pre-teens, too. For such frankness Judy Blume has been heavily censored throughout
the USA but Forever has an important place in the canon of teenage fiction and Blume’s
TEENAGE FICTION: REALISM, ROMANCES, CONTEMPORARY PROBLEM NOVELS 385