Mary Noel Streatfeild called herself a misfit in the vicarage family of her birth. In more than eighty children's and adults' books, however, she often drew on an imaginative, rebellious girlhood. Born in the day before Christmas 1895 to William and...

I had a little green Puffin paperback edition of Ballet Shoes when I was a child. I read it until it fell apart. I still know whole passages by heart. I felt as close to the three Fossil girls as if they were my...

For generations of young girls, reading Noel Streatfeild's classic children's novel Ballet Shoes has been a rite of passage. First published in 1936, it is the rags-to-riches tale of Pauline, Petrova and Posy, three impoverished orphans with dreams of stardom who are adopted by...

All Noel Streatfeild's stories for children reflect something of her vivid memory of her own childhood, her consciousness of the way of life in which she was brought up, and her particular interests. (p. 11) Although there were pleasant times, on the whole she describes her childhood as unhappy. She was the family misfit, a nonconformist in a constant state of rebellion. (p. 13)

The well-chaperoned child star of impeccable propriety had been a feature of American film studios as far back as the early 1900s; but it was not until the 1920s in England that the middle-class images of model child and child actress or ballet dancer began to coalesce. Noel Streatfeild was the first children's author to express the theatre's increasing social respectability … in a book which is respectable also from a literary point of view; and Ballet Shoes, which came out in 1936, re...

Since girls in general are so severely conditioned and repressed and so turned in upon themselves, they fall victims to fantasies in consequence. In Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes, the aptly named Fossils (all orphans) are brought up in a family of the three-servant-poor category (the book was first published in 1936) and go to the Children's Academy of Dancing and Stage Training. It's run by 'Madame' Fidolia who's presented as gracious, talented and immediately in...