Cirrus@Austlit

'In this article I examine a non-canonical Australian children's story, Constance Mackness's The Blossom Children (1927) within the genre of the family story written by women. I argue that this narrative, which is set in 1917 during the Great War, presents the domestic female sphere of the family and corresponding values of compromise, negotiation, and inclusion on a small scale, as a critique of the bellicose wider social order and as a metaphor for an ideal society. An additional, distinctive element is added to the family story through Mackness's protagonist, a thirteen-year-old female “socialist,” Pan, who represents a particularly vigorous example of girlness in her embodiment of Mackness's feminine philosophies'.