The well-chaperoned child star of impeccable propriety had been a feature of American film studios as far back as the early 1900s; but it was not until the 1920s in England that the middle-class images of model child and child actress or ballet dancer began to coalesce. Noel Streatfeild was the first children's author to express the theatre's increasing social respectability … in a book which is respectable also from a literary point of view; and Ballet Shoes, which came out in 1936, remains the best example of the type of fiction which began with it—the family story with a theatrical bias.

It is appropriate that this book should use conventions of the media which provide its subject matter. It is stagey in the obvious sense of being about the preparation for careers on the stage, and also in the sense of being contrived; but the contrivance is that...