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This chapter offers a reading of Bowen's novel, The House in Paris, as her major statement about maternity and orphanhood — subjects that preoccupied her all her life, having strong autobiographical roots. It understands the novel as self-consciously both aligning itself with, and divorcing itself from, the work of Henry James and the 19th-century novel of adultery (Flaubert, Tolstoy), placing unique emphasis on the figure of the child. It interprets the novel's arrestingly unique structure as both a response to Modernist forms and a necessity of the subject matter. It also explores the novel's fairy tale elements and considers its view of its Jewish characters in the light of the rise of European fascism in the 1930s.

These final chapters discuss how two vastly different reworkings of Dickens’s Oliver Twist serve as distinct examples of the problems of adaptation as a method of resistance. Viewing Oliver’s marginalized status within the context of postcolonial theory highlights parallels between domestic orphans and populations colonized by the British imperial project. Turning to Tim Greene’s independently financed, internationally distributed adaptation Boy Called Twist (2004), I highlight the director’s use of orphanhood to address both the poverty and AIDS epidemic that erupted in the wake of Britain’s imperial control of the region as well as the contemporary cooption of the “global orphan” by foreign governments and non-governmental aid organizations (NGOs) that frames transnational aid discourse. Applying Dickens’s social concerns to the orphans of post-Apartheid South Africa and appropriating Dickens’ racial depictions of characters such as Fagin to represent South Africa’s black and Muslim communities, Greene’s film exposes ties between Victorian England’s domestic and imperial policies, making parallels to the contemporary dynamic occurring between industrialized countries and developing nations.

This chapter addresses the first thirty years of Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy's life, and new evidence of both her familial context and her ‘conversion’ to feminism at the age of seventeen. Wolstenholme Elmy's ‘private’ mind is more difficult to assess than the reformer's zeal which prompted her public labours. Her experience of double orphanhood was unique among the leading members of the mid-Victorian feminist movement. Elizabeth's feminism was constructed through what she would later term as ‘the stress of storm and strife’. The bitter family quarrels surrounding Elizabeth's yearning for higher education occurred at precisely the same time as she acknowledged the ‘iniquitous English law of sex slavery’ that enforced the loss of personal identity of every wife in the land. For her, the challenge to ‘sex slavery’ was the taproot on which all other causes were grafted.

This chapter provides, principally through a study of Pierre Bergounioux’s recent novel La Casse, a counter-argument to the book’s defense of connectedness. Bergounioux’s narrator desperately and unsuccessfully seeks to connect to his orphaned and solitary father. He fails to convince his father that they communicate within the Cartesian universal community of “thinking things.” The narrator attempts to escape from his human aloneness through disappearing into nonhuman matter (trees and junk metal). Does the father, the novel implicitly asks, provide a unique, indispensable path into a human community? Bergounioux’s work suggests but does not exploit the possibility of a more productive connection through the mother.

This chapter brings attention to the daily struggles faced by young people in contemporary Uganda, where indeed all children are affected in some way by HIV/AIDS but also by persistent structural, household-level, and/or individual poverty. While HIV/AIDS has certainly shaped the lives of the young people who became youth research assistant for this study, their life stories also demonstrate that it is primarily poverty that continues to mark their experiences, influence their choices, and impinge on their life chances. Aside from growing up in the era of HIV/AIDS, these children are also part of the ‘youth bulge’ in population that has experienced the neoliberal retreat of the state, first under global economic restructuring and later under economic austerity. These factors all intersect to create the challenges and obstacles that shape young people’s lives today, providing illustrative examples of the life trajectories of orphans and vulnerable children as well as insights into the resilience and survival strategies employed by young people throughout Africa. In the process, it also reveals how an engaged researcher can become entwined with the lives of her research subjects.