Imaginative Displacement: Classical Reception in the Young Adult Fiction of Margaret Mahy

Margaret Mahy (1938-2012) wrote many works for young readers: young adult novels, children’s stories, chapter books, educational readers and lectures and essays on aspects of writing. She was New Zealand’s most successful children’s writer, at home and abroad, receiving many national and international honours. Mahy was conscious that her inclinations towards fantasy and fairy tales had been strongly influenced by the stories from overseas that made up her youthful reading. In her essay ‘A Dissolving Ghost,’ she referred to the disjunction between the place she lived, and the mainly British stories she read as a child, as an ‘imaginative displacement’ (Mahy 2000: 32), recognizing a tension commonly felt by New Zealand writers, and acknowledging the pressure she felt to write her New Zealandness more strongly. Her fantasy novels fill what Anna Jackson terms the ‘gap between her colonized imagination and everyday life’ (2011: 48) with a distinctive blend of realism and fantasy that is local and international, even universal, as she entwines ordinary New Zealand life with myth, fantasy and fairytale. Mahy accounted for the scope of her frame of reference, saying that the ‘dislocations’ of that imaginative displacement ‘made me a world rather than categorical’ (2000: 33). As Clare Bradford comments, Mahy’s work is embedded in place, but ‘transnational’ in its imaginative reach (2014: 113).