Fiction has also seen vigor and variety. In 1883, the turgid and improbable Victorian novels gave way to a sprightly retelling of the ballad tradition, with his own excellent illustrations, by the American Howard Pyle: this is still in print. Robin Hood stories for the young became a major sub-genre, with widely successful early-twentieth-century versions by Henry Gilbert and J. Walker McSpadden. The outlaw story also became part of the new English syllabus in secondary schools—probably in part because, unlike Arthurian literature, Robin Hood stories appeared to lack sexual overtones. In both Britain and the United States, Robin Hood plays and short stories proliferated for schools as well as children’s fiction across a wide range, from the 1930s Marxism of Geoffrey Trease to the mainstream retellings of Roger Lancelyn Green and Antonia Pakenham. More up-to-date was the firmer historicism of Parke Godwin and “Nicholas Chase” and the youth-aimed feminism of Robin McKinley and Theresa Tomlinson. This elevation of Marian to hero status, much more seriously than has occurred in television, has an adult formation in Jennifer Roberson’s well-imagined Lady of the Forest (1992) and Gayle Feyrer’s not unthoughtful bodice-ripper The Thief’s Mistress (1996). So far, apart from the farce-euphemized 1988 Maid Marian and the partial independence of Uma Thurman’s Marian, film has approached liberating Marian only in the little-known Disney production Princess of Thieves (2001) with the young Keira Knightley as Robin’s energetic daughter, puzzlingly named Gwyn.
World History
