'You new worlds may justly make': girlhood, imagination, and world-building during the English Civil Wars (1642–1651)

This article explores girlhood imagination in the context of war through an analysis of Jane Cavendish (1621–1669) and Elizabeth Brackley's (1626–1663) juvenilia. Bringing together the fields of the history of childhood, girlhood studies, early modern women's writing, and children and young people in sites of conflict and peacebuilding, it offers a new reading of the sisters' highly self-conscious writing in England during the seventeenth-century civil wars and argues for the significance of historical girl-authored literature to understanding the experiences of young people at times of conflict. It proposes that their writing constitutes a distinctly aged and gendered response that exemplifies the role that creativity might offer the young to negotiate the material and emotional impacts of war. Arguing that their works represent girlhood behaviour as a paradigm for overcoming some of war's challenges, it contends that their youthful authorship is an act of creating alternative worlds and community building in the face of crisis.