Disability as Metaphor Take Up Thy Bed and Walk: Death, Disability and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls. By Lois Keith. London: Women's Press, 2001. Reviewed by Catharine Vaughan-Pow. During the last decade there has been an increasing amount of attention paid to girls' reading experiences during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Specific authors such as Louisa M. Alcott and L.M. Montgomery have been admitted to be worthy of academic study, while the cultural significance of writing for girls has been reassessed. Rosemary Auchmuty's A World of Girls (1992), and A World of Women (1999) both give a positive reading of the popularly trivialised girls' school, while Sally Mitchell's The New Girl (1995) evaluates the cultural activities of the Victorian and Edwardian adolescent female. Those of us who have kept and reread their childhood books admit to it proudly and there are a number of societies, with increasing numbers of members, for the collector and reader of juvenile female fiction. So, I was intrigued by the title of Lois Keith's study of the concepts of death, disability and cure in 'classic' girls' fiction, an area that had not previously received any major study, despite the broad awareness of the impacts of the deaths of Beth March and Judy Woolcot. Take Up Thy Bed and Walk initially appears to be an objective assessment of the constraining demands of an adolescence in which physical activities must be minimised as part of religious and social imperatives and in which disability is consistently used as a metaphor of control. Keith examines eight texts (Jane Eyre [1847], Little Women [1868], What Katy Did [1872], Heidi [1880], Seven Little Australians [1894], The Secret Garden [1911], Pollyanna [1913], and Pollyanna Grows Up [1915]) in some detail, and asserts that the writers of classic girls' fiction consistently presented disability and physical suffering as a punishment for wrongdoing or refusal of the prescribed submissive female role. For example, Katy Carr of What Katy Did disobeys her aunt by using a swing when forbidden to do so; this results in four years of paralysis; Judy Woolcot contracts tuberculosis after she runs away from school. However, death frequently fell to the lot of those who were deemed too good to live, such as Beth March of Little Women, and their redemptive examples of patient endurance acted as an encouragement to their more rebellious sisters or friends. Moreover, Keith contends that, for those who did not die, a cure to illness or disability was necessary in order to provide the happy ending demanded by their readers; thus Pollyanna Pendleton is not left unable to walk, but is successfully cured by a 'great doctor far away.' (The increasing omnipotence of the medical profession is noticeable in children's literature at this time). Her recovery is permissible because she does not rebel against the essentially domestic or internalised processes of adolescence unlike, say, Judy Woolcot whose tuberculosis had not caused any profound change in her character, and who does subsequently die (although not of disease). Keith obviously values these books and offers a number of useful insights into the functions and processes of disability and/or disease as these were perceived both by these specific authors and, by inference, the societies that they depicted. However, while this analysis was enjoyable, I do have a number of concerns with the way in which material was selected for inclusion, and also with the author's own focus, which shifts dramatically in the book's final chapter and conclusion. There is also a need for a more rigorous editing process; misspelling and the failure to identify quotations are unacceptable. The inclusion of non-British texts (four are American and one Australian) is refreshing, although this does suggest a universality of social perspective that was not necessarily the case. Moreover, Keith is given to generalisation about the contexts within which the various novels were produced; published as they were between 1847 and 1915 there is a span of 68 years to be assessed but, Keith remarks, the books appear to have 'much in common'(12), and demonstrates little awareness of the remarkable changes that affected British, US and Australian societies throughout this period. She refers to 'the Victorian novels discussed in the first six chapters of this book' (246), although three of the eight were published after 1910, and this blurring of historical boundaries allows for a similar blurring of perspective to occur and for nineteenth-century attitudes to disability to be seen as largely homogeneous. Furthermore, the inclusion of Jane Eyre as being primarily a text for girls is difficult to support; although the book is identified as having this status (and certainly many readers, myself included, first read it as adolescents and identified strongly with Jane's struggles), it is the one novel of the eight that was not written primarily for a juvenile audience, and as such offers a significantly different perspective to that of the other novels studied. Keith' reliance upon the 'classics' as a criterion for selection also poses a problem; she appears to use accessibility as a major criterion by which 'classic' is defined stating that 'all the titles have been in continuous publication since they were first in print' (11), and the assumption appears to be that those texts which are still read (or at least bought) offer the most representative view of a society, while other texts that have not remained in print may have provided a better source of material for the book's argument. I am thinking here of novels such as Rosa Nouchette Carey's Averil, (1891) or Dinah Mulock Craik's Olive (1854), in which the protagonist herself is disabled, but their unavailability for contemporary readers would disqualify them from inclusion here. Had the study concluded with the chapter dealing with Seven Little Australians, Keith would have fulfilled the parameters that she apparently set herself and produced a concise and enjoyable discussion on some of the social and personal attitudes to disability and death which were prevalent in middle-class society between 1847 and 1915. However, the book's final chapter is entitled 'What Writers Did Next; Representations of Disability in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century', and here Keith moves abruptly to a discussion of depictions of disability in writing for children (not girls) and the extent to which authors still used disability to convey a 'message' to readers. Moreover in assessing (and largely approving) books such as Scribbleboy (Philip Ridley, 1997) and Blabbermouth (Morris Gleitzman, 1995), she allows herself to adopt a tone of moral superiority towards the texts discussed earlier; for example, the characters of Beth March and Helen Burns are dismissed as being 'purely to service the emotional growth of the non-disabled protagonist' (208). This type of comment indicates that Keith is ultimately concerned with a broader study of disability and its representations within various contemporary contexts than the title and introduction suggest. She has thus selected 'classics' not for their applicability within the context of her project, but for her expectation that her readers will be broadly familiar with these specific instances of disability from a variety of cultural contexts (all the books have been adapted for television or cinema) - hence the necessary omission of any texts written between 1915 and 1950, when 'classics' did not include any depictions of disability. This final emphasis upon contemporary writing about disability thus undermines the major part of the study and suggests that Keith has combined two projects both of which are concerned with disability and death in children's literature, but which required individual focus. This necessarily causes the book to fall into two separate sections, and although both contain much that is useful, there is a lack of focus that is ultimately dissatisfying. Catharine Vaughan-Pow recently completed a PhD at The University of Queensland on Victorian Women's Writing.