The Fledgling by Jane Langton

First published: 1980

Subjects: Coming-of-age, friendship, and nature

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Fantasy

Time of work: The 1970’s

Recommended Ages: 10-13

Locale: Concord, Massachusetts

Principal Characters:

• Georgina (Georgie) Dorian, a quiet, observant, reflective eight-year-old, small for her age, who believes that she can fly
• The Goose Prince, a Canada goose, an aging widower who befriends Georgie and teaches her to fly
• Eleanor Hall, Georgie’s orphaned fourteen-year-old stepcousin, who is caught in the turmoil of adolescence
• Edward (Eddy) Hall, Eleanor’s twelve-year-old brother, whose current passion is model rockets
• Frederick Hall (Uncle Freddy), Georgie’s stepfather, an exuberant professor of Transcendentalism and the guardian of Eleanor and Eddy
• Alexandra Dorian Hall (Aunt Alex), Georgie’s mother and Uncle Freddy’s colleague and wife
• Mr. Ralph Alonzo Preek, the insensitive and misguided local bank president
• Miss Madeline Prawn, the Hall family’s nosy neighbor

Form and Content

From its opening scene, The Fledgling conveys a sense of the cycles of life. An old goose on his last migration through Concord, Massachusetts, spots in Walden Pond a special present that he will pass on to the novel’s protagonist, who will find both wonder and comfort in this gift. Georgie first appears in the novel trying once again, under the gaze of a bust of Henry David Thoreau, painfully, unsuccessfully, to fly down the dark front hall steps. Eleanor and Eddy rush in to gather up their undersized, crazy cousin, whom they fear will never turn out normal. Georgie’s mother worries about Georgie as well, but she allows her daughter her own choices: a beloved corncob doll, a favorite pair of red overalls, and, most important, the realization of a dream, leaving nightly to fly with the Goose Prince.

In a reversed hunting scene that illustrates the varying third-person point of view in the text, Georgie’s red overalls catch the eye of the old goose as he flies overhead, looking for someone to whom he might give his present. When the goose first approaches Georgie, he is frightened away by interfering Ralph Preek, who will become obsessed, Ahab-like, with hunting down the animal. Georgie has understood what Mr. Preek has not: that the Goose Prince is trying to be her friend and that he wants to teach her to fly. Mr. Preek resolves to destroy the “large duck” that he believes holds Georgie in its power, and, in one of the many instances of parallelism in the text, he practices aiming his new shotgun—at a photograph of Thoreau on the living room wall.

Despite the intrusion of Mr. Preek, the old goose comes to Georgie’s window to begin a series of enchanted nights in which he teaches her to fly. The phases of the moon—signs of the cycles of nature—mark Georgie’s advancing aeronautic skill and the growth of a friendship of quiet understanding with the Goose Prince, who tells Georgie that he has a present for her. The circle begins to close on the first night of the hunting season, when Ralph Preek, aiming at the two big ducks that he has been stalking, is disappointed to have brought down only the smaller of the two—Georgie. Georgie’s family intensifies its efforts to protect their fledgling, but Georgie summons her Goose Prince a final time, after what she believes is the last hour of the hunting season. Georgie recognizes that she has become too big to fly—her red overalls are now halfway up her shins—but wants to say goodbye. Because the night has come to set back the clocks, midnight strikes twice, and Georgie suffers the closing of the circle: the murder of her prince by the vigilant Mr. Preek, who has been alerted by meddlesome Miss Prawn. The Goose Prince’s gift has been lost, and Georgie enters into a cycle of mourning. She is healed by finding the goose’s present: a small, blue-and-white-streaked ball. Having already promised the prince to “take good care of it,” Georgie witnesses in the darkness of the front hall closet the transformation of the ball into a great gleaming globe that is “the whole world.”

Critical Context

Considered Jane Langton’s highest literary achievement, The Fledgling was a Newbery Honor Book for 1981 and a nominee for an American Book Award in 1982. This work is the fourth in a five-book fantasy series (Langton’s favorites among her works) about the Hall family, consisting of The Diamond in the Window (1962), The Swing in the Summerhouse (1967), The Astonishing Stereoscope (1971), The Fledgling, and The Fragile Flag (1984). Georgie Dorian makes her first appearance in The Swing in the Summerhouse as a four-year-old with a passionate desire to read so that she can decode the messages in the world around her. In The Fledgling, Georgie takes center stage to receive the message in the gift that the Goose Prince has given her. In The Fragile Flag, Georgie fulfills her responsibility to protect the earth by leading a children’s march to Washington, D.C., where she persuades the president to cancel a nuclear missile program. Langton’s political activism, born of the Vietnam War era, underpins this last of the Hall family novels. Important to all five of the novels is Langton’s residence near historically rich Concord, Massachusetts. That Langton would choose for the epigraph of The Fledgling a quotation not from Thoreau’s familiar Walden (1854) but from his posthumously published essay “Walking” (1862) shows the depth of her immersion in the Transcendental tradition.