Mary Louisa Molesworth (1839-1921), generally known as Mrs. Molesworth, was one of the most successful children's writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. She published Tell me a Story, her first children's book in 1875, which received a great deal of acclaim from the critics. Molesworth's talents as a children's author were early recognized by her contemporaries, and she published successively Carrots: Just a Little Boy (1876) and The Cuckoo Clock (1877), the works for which she is still best known. Molesworth thus established her reputation as a popular writer at a very early stage, and during the course of her career she produced more than a hundred stories for children. To find out what sort of views and attitudes on family relationships and gender roles are reflected in her works will be a central concern of this paper.
Molesworth created characters in her writing based on certain gender categorizations, and the relationship of adults with children marks a striking contrast in her stories. The typical relationship between male figures-particularly fathers-and children is open and formal: it is always under strict rules, order, and a hierarchy within the household. On the other hand, the female, especially the mother, establishes a close, intimate relationship with children, and this relationship creates a special link between them, emphasizing the mother's emotional and psychological understanding of the child. Such a relationship makes children feel secure enough to confide their feelings, which embraces an intuitive instinct that implies a sub-linguistic bond between them, whereas the father's attitude, which demands verbal explicitness and explication, is often too formal for them to do so. The female acts as a key figure, and the popular image of her is that of an arbitrator, who has the ability for reconciliation and family unity. The ‘male’ and ‘female’ figures in this discussion do not necessarily refer to the actual gender of the characters, but represent rather the two essential ‘cores’ of the adult characters' features with their vital roles to the child protagonists. This therefore enables Molesworth to utilize either way for emphasizing or producing a twist in her characterization, and also to widen the scope of conventional views on gender roles.
In Molesworth's writing, as a whole there is an evident difference between the stories for children and the novel. The latter often rules out the recurring portrait of the caring, compassionate mother. In terms of mother-daughter relationships in particular, Molesworth carefully modified her treatment, according to the nature of book she was working on, and to its intended readership. Mary Louisa Molesworth explored the various states of the Victorian's lives -essentially, the female lives -of both the child and the adult, and her consistent interest in the female is the predominant theme running throughout her books, and for this paper, too.

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Agatha Christie (1890-1976) has long been axiomatically referred to as “the mistress of mystery,” but it is not widely known that this world-famous author was also a poet. She had sent her poems to The Poetry Review, some of which had been printed in the magazine before she made her debut as a mystery writer with her first novel The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920). Furthermore, she had a collection of poems—The Road of Dreams (1925)—published through a presumably private-funded way five years after she got into the storytelling business. This means that her creative impetus in her early years was basically for poetry. Then, what on earth brought Christie, who had started writing poems during her adolescence, to the genre of detective novels? How did poetry come to terms with mystery in her case? In this paper I would like to elucidate these issues by examining Christie’s early imaginative visions represented in her poems and to reveal some connection between her poetry and stories. My main focus is, above all, on her attachment to the characters in pantomimes, such as Harlequin, Columbine, and Pierrot, which is clearly seen in her poem ‘A Masque from Italy’ that might be a prototype of her later narratives.

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薬学出身でありながら他分野で活躍されている方にインタビューするコラム「薬学がくれた私の道」．今回は東北大学大学院薬学研究科を修了された薬学博士でありながらSFやホラーの分野で作家としてご活躍中の瀬名秀明さんの登場です．

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教育老年学は社会老年学と生涯学習をつなげる研究領域である。そこではエイジングをポジティヴにとらえる視点が重視され，この具体例としてオールド・エイジ・スタイル（＝高齢者特有の芸術スタイル）があげられる。教育老年学の視点から現代の高齢者にかかわる課題としてここでは，メディカライゼーション，高齢者観の変容，性別役割分業，ひとり暮らし高齢者の増加，政治問題としてのエイジングをあげた。これらに向き合う高齢者学習支援の場としては，高齢者大学, 第三期の大学，エルダーホステル，一般市民向け学習機関をあげ，高齢者の多様性を活性化する教育老年学の方向を示唆した。

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