Swallows and Amazons

Nancy Blackett is a fictional character in nine of the twelve juvenile novels in Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series of books. She is a bit... of a tomboy—acting as captain of the dinghy, Amazon and usually directing her friends in their various adventures. Nancy apparently has no real-world counterpart as an inspirational source for Ransome but appears to be completely the author's creation. Nancy is sometimes critically viewed as a subversive character for girl readers. The character appeared in a 1963 BBC television adaptation of Swallows and Amazons as well as in a 1974 film adaptation of the book. At the opening of the series in Swallows and Amazons, Nancy is 12 years old and lives with her younger sister Peggy and her widowed mother in a large Lakeland house called Beckfoot. In common with his treatment of many of his other characters, Ransome does not give a detailed description of Nancy, merely describing her as "bigger than John" . She is something of a tomboy who captains a dinghy called Amazon, usually wears a red pirate cap and often uses nautical or piratical words in her speech, such as "Jibbooms and bobstays" or the classic "shiver my timbers.
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Swallows and Amazons is a 1974 film directed by Claude Whatham.

Children's literature as such probably started in the 17th century; it is generally believed that before then books were written mainly for adults.... Additionally, most printed works were hard to come by due to their cost and were mostly available for purchase only by upper class society. Scholarship on children's literature includes professional organizations, dedicated publications and university courses. There is some debate on what constitutes children's literature. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as "a human being below the age of 18 years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier". Some books written for children, such as The Young Visiters by Daisy Ashford or the juvenilia of Jane Austen, written to amuse brothers and sisters, are also written by children. Anne Frank wrote a novel and many very short stories in addition to her diary . Barbara Newhall Follett wrote four books, beginning with a novel called The House Without Windows at the age of nine; when the manuscript was destroyed in a fire, she rewrote it from memory.
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