100 Ways to Make a Japanese House

© 2012 Children’s Literature Association. Pp. 153–163. Scenes of children making dollhouses are something of a leitmotif in Rumer Godden’s celebrated doll stories. Her first children’s novel, The Dolls’ House (1947), has sisters Charlotte and Emily Dane refurbishing a Victorian dollhouse, while in 1956’s The Fairy Doll, the young protagonist Elizabeth fashions a more unassuming home for her doll. Of course, Charlotte, Emily, and Elizabeth are not alone in these pursuits, and Godden is not the only mid-twentieth-century children’s writer to detail them. One of Elinor Brent-Dyer’s Chalet School heroines, Tom Gay, creates many dollhouses in her time at the school, selling these at the end-of-school sales; the first appears in Tom Tackles the Chalet School (serialized in 1947 and 1948 before being released as a single volume in 1955). The Five Dolls series by Helen Clare is likewise full of improvised dollhouse objects and craft activities; in Five Dolls in a House (1953), for example, heroine Elizabeth converts her child-sized blue velvet ribbon into a dolls’ staircase carpet, blithely saying, “we’ll pin it on with drawing-pins as I haven’t any stair rods” (58). However, what is an ancillary, if significant, motif in Brent-Dyer, Clare, and even The Dolls’ House or The Fairy Doll becomes the defining narrative preoccupation in two of Godden’s lesser-known works, her 1961 children’s novel Miss Happiness and Miss Flower and its sequel Little Plum (1963). Indeed, before the narrative proper of Miss Happiness even begins, Godden signals the focus on dollhouse crafts with her acknowledgements: