“Bring[ing] back the fairy times”: Framing the Child in Frances Browne’s Granny’s Wonderful Chair

This chapter considers the figure of the child in Granny’s Wonderful Chair (1856), a collection of fairy tales by Frances Browne (1816–79), the once-popular Irish poet known as the “Blind Poetess of Ulster.” Browne’s poetry has been the subject of critical reassessment in recent years, and there is a vibrant local interest in her life and work in her native Stranorlar, County Donegal. However, despite Jack Zipes’s brief acknowledgement of Browne’s “significant contribution to the fairy-tale genre,” in his broader discussion of “the general trend [in the period 1840 to 1880] … to use the fairy-tale form in innovative ways to raise social consciousness about the disparities among the different social classes” (xix), Granny’s Wonderful Chair has received limited critical attention. As Colin Manlove, who considers Browne’s “neglected nursery classic” the “first truly Christian Victorian fantasy,” notes: “Accounts of children’s literature tend to pass by Granny’s Wonderful Chair with benign nods, essays on it are not to be found. Yet it is arguably one of the great works of Victorian fantasy, which the magnificence of The Rose and the Ring, The Water-Babies and the Alice books has concealed” (19). This chapter seeks to redress this critical neglect by exploring more fully how Browne’s work engages with literary cultures of childhood and the history of the fairy tale in ways that have been highly influential, if not always fully acknowledged.