Dr. Edel Lamb’s newest article, entitled “‘you new worlds may justly make\u2019: Youth, Imagination and World-Building During the English Civil Wars”, dives into the literary oeuvre of Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, two sisters growing up in seventeenth-century England. Isolated to their home as a result of the ongoing English Civil War, the two young girls created an alternate reality for themselves in plays and poems, one filled with youthful freedom, romantic courtship, and–crucially–a future after war. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In analyzing Jane and Elizabeth’s works, Lamb recovers a young insight into the challenges of growing up during conflict and the playful coping strategies young women might have used to make sense of their surroundings. She presents a framework for examining young peoples’ creativity and authorship as instrumental tools of understanding human responses to war and peace. Her article appears in 19.2 of the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth<\/em> published in June 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To start off, how would you summarize the core argument of your chapter? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This article takes the writings of two sisters \u2013 Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley – during the period of the English civil wars as a case study to argue that creativity offered girls in the past a mode for depicting their experiences, negotiating their emotions, and building communities during periods of conflict.\u00a0In other words, it reads their writing of poems and drama as a form of resilience in extreme situations.\u00a0 It suggests that by considering their texts in this way, we might begin to trace a longer history of young people\u2019s experiences of conflict and the important roles they play in responding to crisis through storytelling and performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In your article, you discuss various parameters that categorize the Cavendish sisters as youth. How do our twenty-first century definitions of youth differ from seventeenth-century definitions amidst a civil war? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I adopt an expansive understanding of what defines these girls as youthful.\u00a0 These sisters are in their late teens and early twenties when they write these texts, but as I note in the article the war\u2019s deferral of the rituals that normally mark a transition into adulthood for early modern girls positions them in what Deanne Williams has termed a \u2018protracted\u2019 girlhood (Shakespeare and the Performance of Girlhood<\/em>, 189).\u00a0In many ways, I think this maps on to how we define youth now: age in years is only part of that and it varies depending on the legal definitions, institutional and family contexts, and social rituals that define youth differently in the twenty-first century.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Much of my work focuses on how childhood, youth, boyhood, and girlhood are defined by particular early modern contexts and I always situate that within current conceptualisations of these states as performative and culturally constructed and contingent.\u00a0For my current project on writing by girls, I resist taking a particular age as an endpoint for girlhood, and I think that has parallels now.\u00a0In an opening seminar for my MA module at Queen\u2019s University Belfast on Shakespearean Childhoods, my students begin by discussing how they define these terms and I am always struck by how they define themselves as young or youthful as students, even though most of them are in their early to mid-twenties.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Could you elaborate on the role that ideas of stagnation and future play for the Cavendish sisters and how this intersects with their youth? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n War for these girls results in a prolonged stay in the family home and when the home of this royalist family is occupied by parliamentarian forces they are effectively under house arrest. War then creates a situation in which many elements of normal life are put on hold. This would inevitably place anyone in a state of deferral, but it is particularly significant for young people then, as it would be now.\u00a0Youth is often a transitional phase of developing identities and looking to the future.\u00a0What is particularly interesting in the case of the Cavendish sisters, I think, is how writing (and possibly also performing) their own plays offers a way of continuing with what would have been normal in their lives. They are the daughters of the author, William Cavendish.\u00a0Writing plays and poetry is part of their elite family culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I argue that writing during this time of war is one way that they continue family life. It is also a way in which they imaginatively explore what it means to be in this state of stagnation in their drama. The characters of their play, The Concealed Fancies<\/em>, are girls of similar ages who are also deferred from moving forward in a time of war.\u00a0The play imagines that the war ends and the characters celebrate that this allows loved ones to return, including suitors for the girls, and lets them move forward with their lives.\u00a0The way in which the Cavendish sisters represent girlhood during wartime as a tension between stagnation and a desire to move forward in their drama suggests they are extremely sensitive to these competing impulses in their own wartime experience of youth.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n This period of stagnation fosters strong sibling bonds. How may we read sisterhood as domestic and female resilience? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Sisterhood is an important element of the Cavendish girls\u2019 wartime experience and their writing.\u00a0Jane and Elizabeth write the plays together, but they may have written them for their younger sister Frances who is also in the family home.\u00a0A number of the poems are dedicated to each other, as well as to other family members. Their poetry and plays then are part of shared sibling experience.\u00a0They also depict groups of siblings in the plays and present their shared modes of surviving the war as they explore the house together, talk together, imagine together.\u00a0In the context of being in the domestic space during a period of war, these shared activities and representations of sibling bonds are modes of not simply surviving and passing time, but of emotional support and creating community.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Is there any evidence that the sisters performed their plays to and with each other?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n We don\u2019t know for sure.\u00a0Before the war, plays would definitely have been performed in the family home. Girls\u00a0across elite households often put on performances before and after this period, with various members of the household and even neighbouring households taking part in and watching these performances.\u00a0So their play is definitely written with these possibilities of performance in mind.\u00a0But we don\u2019t have evidence that the sisters actually performed the plays they wrote during this period of war. Many scholars have thought about them as a way of passing the time and distracting themselves during this time, and my article develops this by thinking about how if they were performed they worked as a mode of community building for the wider community of Welbeck Abbey.\u00a0But unfortunately we don\u2019t have evidence to claim that they were definitely performed!<\/p>\n\n\n\n I stumbled upon the concept of \u201cemotional echoing.\u201d How might this concept enrich the field of historical childhood studies? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2018A Critical Conversation on Agency\u2019 in the 2024 issue of JHCY<\/em> led me to Karen Vallgarda and Katrine R\u00f8nsig Larsen\u2019s development of this concept in their analysis of twentieth-century young people\u2019s experiences in contexts of divorce.\u00a0For me, it resonated with how I was thinking about the ways in which I we might use literary texts by girls for work on the history of childhood and youth.\u00a0Early modern girls who write are often well-educated and widely read, and as a result the texts they write are always conscious of generic conventions and use common tropes.\u00a0Thinking about how their use of familiar models \u2013 familial, literary, from other media \u2013 in their writing can also function as an emotive tool to mediate and echo their emotional experiences offers a way of reading literature by children as an important resource for youth-centred history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your primary sources are plays and poems, not diaries. What are the limits of using these creative productions as reflections of the young authors\u2019 lives? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Although I do read the plays and poems via this approach of \u2018emotional echoing\u2019 as important sources for thinking about the emotions and experiences of children and young people in the past, I am always conscious of these texts as literature.\u00a0The poems and plays do relate closely to the lived experiences of the Cavendish sisters in the ways that they are often written directly to family members.\u00a0But while it is very tempting to align the experiences of the young female characters in the play which is set during a war with the lives of these young authors, the play is fictional.\u00a0What I do thinks these texts can reveal about the young authors’ lives, however, is how important writing and creativity is to them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n What section from the texts you looked at particularly stuck with you?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n As someone who also works on Shakespeare and early modern performance, I always enjoy self-conscious references to performance in The Concealed Fancies<\/em>.\u00a0In addition to the reference to Cleopatra, which I mention in the article, the play echoes elements of As You Like It<\/em>, in having young women deliver prologues and epilogues, in the depiction of female friendships and the ways in which young women get what they want in romance.\u00a0When I first read the play these representations of young women and their imaginations were what struck me.\u00a0But as I thought further about the play in the context of wartime experience, I found the shift from playful \u2018fancies\u2019 as a mode of passing the time to one of the young character\u2019s description of what they have experienced as \u2018hell\u2019 and \u2018darkness\u2019 is what has stayed with me and influenced my interpretation of the texts for this article. A young female character \u2013 known only as \u2018Sh\u2019 in the text – talks about the two sides to this wartime experience as worlds \u2018that imitate the other\u2019.\u00a0For me, this brief tonal shift in the play \u2013 which is primarily a comedy \u2013 gives an insight into how the playful fancies in which these girls indulge during this time of crisis does not mean they are oblivious to it or unaffected by it.\u00a0In fact, it is the juxtaposition of play and grief that gives an insight into the impact of violence on these young characters.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n As you were working on your article, did you have similar contexts in mind of girls exhibiting creative and playful resilience in the face of crisis?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I first read the sisters\u2019 play when I was a student, but I re-read it during the Covid lockdowns in the early stages of my larger project on girls\u2019 writing.\u00a0My children were making up their own games to entertain themselves, and my daughter was writing stories as part of the schoolwork she was being set to do at home and as her own way of passing the time during lockdown. This definitely had an impact on my interpretation of it!\u00a0Since then I have also been thinking about the Cavendish sisters\u2019 poetry, drama and their possible performance in relation to recent examples of young people\u2019s ways of telling their stories in conflict and post-conflict societies.\u00a0Works on youth, the arts and peacebuilding has really shaped my approach to reading their texts in this article.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n How does this article fit into your current broader research project? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n This article is my broader research into girls\u2019 writing.\u00a0I\u2019m currently finishing a monograph as part of a Leverhulme-funded project which explores girl authorship in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.\u00a0It\u2019s also part of my work on thinking about early modern girls\u2019 writing as part of a broader history of the importance of children and young people\u2019s creativity.\u00a0I\u2019m currently co-editing a collection with Jennifer Duggan (University of South-Eastern Norway) and Lois Burke (University of Stirling) on girls\u2019 participation in fan practices across time and media.\u00a0I\u2019m also drawing on this article to think about girls, the arts, and peacebuilding as co-lead of the \u2018Arts and Peacebuilding\u2019 network at the Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen\u2019s.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n To end on a personal note, we\u2019d like to ask you about a few of your favorite things\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n I am not a good role model in terms of managing notes and citations!\u00a0For my research on early modern girls\u2019 writing, my notes are across various notebooks and files.\u00a0 My resolution is to learn how to use some of the great digital options available once I finish my current book!<\/p>\n\n\n\n One of the many pleasures of this current research project has been reading books in the field of history and childhood and youth.\u00a0But as an early modernist at heart, I keep re-reading Caroline Bick’s Cognition and Girlhood in Shakespeare’s World: Rethinking Female Adolescence <\/em>(CUP, 2021).\u00a0The way in which she reconceptualises girlhood and girls\u2019 cognitive abilities in the period has been crucial to my thinking for this project.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I love this question, and always find it impossible to answer!\u00a0 I read a lot as a child, and my favourites for a long time were the Chalet School <\/em>series and all of the Anne <\/em>books, especially the ones set during the world wars.\u00a0When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit <\/em>stunned me the first time I read it, and it was another one that I read often.\u00a0I have obviously been interested in thinking about the relationships between literature, girlhood, and war for a long time!<\/p>\n\n\n\n Edel Lamb is Reader in Renaissance Literature at Queen\u2019s University Belfast. She is the author For more information see https:\/\/pure.qub.ac.uk\/en\/persons\/edel-lamb\/ <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dr. Edel Lamb’s newest article, entitled “‘you new worlds may justly make\u2019: Youth, Imagination and World-Building During the English Civil Wars”, dives into the literary oeuvre of Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley, two sisters growing up in seventeenth-century England. Isolated to their home as a result of the ongoing English Civil War, the two young girls created an alternate reality for themselves in plays and poems, one filled with youthful freedom, romantic courtship, and–crucially–a future after war. In analyzing Jane and Elizabeth’s works, Lamb recovers a young insight into the challenges of growing up during conflict and the playful coping<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":1409,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
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of two Palgrave monographs – Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre (2009) and
Reading Children in Early Modern Culture (2018) – and is currently completing her Leverhulme-
funded monograph on writing by early modern girls. She is co-editor, with Lois Burke and
Jennifer Duggan, of Girls\u2019 and Young Women\u2019s Participatory Cultures Across History
(forthcoming Routledge). <\/p>\n\n\n\n