
A Thoroughly Mischievous Person
From the Back Cover:
First published in 1930, Swallows and Amazons secured Arthur Ransome’s reputation as one of the most influential children’s authors of all time, yet prior to writing fiction he had had a turbulent career as a journalist and war correspondent in revolutionary Russia. In this refreshing account of Ransome’s work, Alan Kennedy sets out to explain his enduring appeal, combining literary criticism with psychological expertise.
Not only did Ransome apply a careful narrative theory to his works, his use of symbolism aligning them more with the modernist tradition than with the event-driven children’s literature of contemporaries such as Richmal Crompton and Enid Blyton, but his novels are also more than usually autobiographical. This Kennedy ably demonstrates with reference to three particular challenges Ransome faced in a seriously conflicted life: his father’s untimely death, his abandonment of his infant daughter in order to escape his catastrophic first marriage, and the innumerable compromises that kept him alive during his Russian exile. A Thoroughly Mischievous Person is the first study to tackle this matter systematically, giving casual and scholarly readers alike new insights into the ‘other’ Arthur Ransome.
Alan Kennedy is Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the University of Dundee. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, an Honorary Member of The Experimental Psychology Society, and a Member of the Society of Authors. Previous publications include Reading as a Perceptual Process (Elsevier, 2000) and The Psychology of Reading (Routledge, 2020) as well as several articles in the journal of the Arthur Ransome Society.
A Thoroughly Mischievous Person is an important book for anyone with an interest in Arthur Ransome. Alan Kennedy shows how Ransome’s magical Swallows and Amazons novels are far more than stories of holiday adventure. Full of allusion to myth, fairy tale and the difficulties of his own family, and largely ignored by his biographers, they are in fact a hidden autobiography and set out to resolve the psychological tensions in his own conflicted life.
- Julian Lovelock, Senior Research Fellow at the University of Buckingham and author of Swallows, Amazons and Coots.
The book is a multi-layered psychological analysis of Ransome’s literary genius. Insights from experimental research are used to explain how Ransome succeeds in the engineering of fictional worlds in a reader's mind, and psychoanalytic insights are used to argue that individual characters, objects, and events capture the reader because they are pointers to deeper universal experiences. The book also offers a fascinating perspective on Ransome’s complex personality, in particular, his use of fiction to reach a child that he cannot reach in real life.
- Albrecht Inhoff , Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Binghamton University
A lover of the English countryside and a friend and apostle of Lenin and Trotsky, haring lodgings at different times with the nature poet Edward Thomas and the Bolshevik agent Karl Radek, Arthur Ransome moved with apparent ease through many different worlds, a twentieth-century shape-shifter --or at least a camouflage artist, able to hide his identity in plain sight, a naive enthusiast among cynics or, alternatively, himself spying for various agencies on friends and colleagues. But it was as the author of the Swallows and Amazons books that he found his lasting identity, his stories enthralling generations of children, including the author of the present study. Alan Kennedy brings a lifetime’s admiration but also the interpretative skills of a professor of psychology to bear upon this fascinating and enigmatic character, exploring his life and character in the light of a psychoanalytic reading of the novels which opens up some of the darkest places of the man and the century. Kennedy situates Ransome within the main currents of contemporary history, with a vivacity and vigour that holds the reader’s attention throughout. This account of Arthur Ransome is as stimulating and intriguing as the man himself.
- Stan Smith, Emeritus Professor of English, Nottingham Trent University