Joyce Lankester Brisley’s Bunchy as the Shadow of Milly-Molly-Mandy

Abstract

AbstractThe continuing popularity of Brisley’s Milly Molly Mandy stories notwithstanding, critical commentary on Brisley’s work is scarce. June Factor, writing in 1979, praised her reconstruction of “English village life before the First World War.” But the stories are set later– between the wars. They exhibit documentary realism, even while they cooperate with a national idealization of country living in this period. In so doing, they may be contrasted with Brisley’s Bunchy stories. Bunchy’s adventures are unnerving fantasies, very different from Milly Molly Mandy’s credible expeditions. They reflect Bunchy’s situation as an orphan, living with her apparently widowed grandmother, and without playmates on the outskirts of Milly Molly Mandy’s village. Bunchy’s make-believe companions (formed out of pastry dough, inadequate drawings etc.) are not just unsatisfactory as such—they are threatening allusions to mortality and loss. It could be that they reflect Brisley’s own disrupted life-history.