Nancy Blackett - Critical Commentary

Critical Commentary

When Ransome was first writing Swallows and Amazons in 1928, it was unusual for a female character to display such active leadership over males as Nancy Blackett does in the whole series of books and whilst children in children's literature had become increasingly self-motivated towards the end of the 19th century, they were, until Swallows and Amazons, still largely bounded by a "closed nursery-orientated world". Nevertheless, despite writing Nancy in an unconventional role, Hunt suggests that Ransome can still be accused of sexism as Susan Walker's domesticity reinforces the common views of the time; however, he points out that gender is unimportant in Ransome's work.

Despite ageing from about twelve to fifteen over the series Nancy, in common with all the children in Ransome's books, shows no sign of developing any interest in sex; in this Ransome is merely reflecting the historical and cultural context of the time, as "Children's fiction in the 1930s had found no way of writing about sex." Victor Watson, a critic of children's fiction, proposes that Nancy's principal role in the books is to open up "possibilities" and "disrupt the comfortable certainties of the Walker family". He observes that she is a force of goodness, especially in the way she deals with her adult counterpart, the Great Aunt, in The Picts and the Martyrs. Nancy shares many characteristics with the Great Aunt, but she displays a "heroic generosity" which the Great Aunt does not have, but not the adult's innate cruelty.

In 1960, a possible path for Nancy's adult life was proposed when critic Hugh Shelley postulated that she might have found the Second World War liberating and become a WREN. He suggested that "as a character one feels she could not be transmuted into a normal, satisfactory adult". Recent analysis of Shelley's work by Katherine Holden has concluded the suggestion is a veiled reference to lesbianism and this, as well as his idea that Nancy would have eventually grown to be like her spinster Great Aunt Maria, has been dismissed as reflecting the homophobia of the time when Shelley was writing. Today, Nancy is viewed as a subversive figure who, in the context of interwar Britain, offered young girls the possibility of an alternative route to adulthood. The character has been cited by feminist author and academic Sara Maitland as a childhood role model "who transcended the restriction of femininity without succumbing to the lure of male-identification" and a "hero who had all the characteristics necessary for the job; who lived between the countries of the material and the imaginary".