Despite the enthusiastic critical response that greeted the publication of Jane Gardam's first two books and the many awards her eighteen books have won, her work has received little scholarly attention. Given Gardam's satiric portrait of the American scholar in The Sidmouth Letters (1980) and equally satiric picture of children's literature circles in The Queen of the Tambourine (1991), such scholarly silence may relieve the author. It may also reflect the ambiguous nature of her work. Her books are not widely read in North America, perhaps not so much because of her sensitivity to the nuances of English class distinction (the feature her English reviewers tend to praise and about which American reviewers feel ambivalent), as the fact that her work resists easy labeling. Feminists tend to see her work as too conservative, just as conservatives sense that she is not quite one of the tribe. Similarly, reviewers have trouble...