Participants > Panelists > Nelson Claudia

As the great-granddaughter of Robert Dale Owen, Newbery Honor winner Caroline Dale Snedeker (1871-1956) had a strong interest in history. While some of her successful novels for children were set in the American past and made use of her own birthplace of New Harmony, Indiana, most went considerably further back in time, being set in ancient Greece or Rome. This paper will discuss Snedeker's two Roman novels with female protagonists, The Forgotten Daughter (1933) and The White Isle (1940), with a particular focus on the spatial metaphors that she uses to organize and present the distant past to young readers. Both protagonists find themselves crossing social and geographical borders, in that the heroine of The Forgotten Daughter is transformed from slave on her father's country estate to acknowledged daughter with a legitimate place in Roman society, while the heroine of The White Isle is exiled from Rome to Britain and must similarly come to terms with her new life. In both cases, we suggest, one function of the spatial disruptions undergone by these protagonists is to model for Snedeker's child readers the appropriate way to “relocate” imaginatively in the past.