The novel centres on the three adopted Fossil sisters: The girls’ unusual surname was invented because their rescuer, “Gum”, is a fossil hunter. In 2019 Ballet Shoes was included in a list of the 100 most influential novels chosen by a panel of curators, writers and critics commissioned by the BBC. The career novels filled a niche in providing girls with information about alternatives to full-time domesticity, within a fictional narrative. The peak in popularity of the career novels in Britain was from the mid to late 1950s, when the variety of jobs open to female school-leavers was widening, and paid employment was beginning to be seen less as a stop-gap between leaving school and marriage. The story concerns the discovery of the emerging talents of three young sisters, who are forced into becoming professional performers by financial necessity, even though one of them has no interest in, or talent for ballet, instead dreaming of working with aircraft. Published in 1936, it is one of the earliest career novels, a genre that emerged almost simultaneously in the USA and Britain. Ballet Shoes: A Story of Three Children on the Stage, is a children’s novel written by the English author Noel Streatfeild.
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