What Maisie Knew Themes

What Maisie Knew is a book about families in more ways than one. Here's what we mean: James wants us to think about what it means to be left in the lurch by your birth family, the very people who a...

As a coming-of-age story that centers on a super-young protagonist, Maisie is a meditation on youth from start to finish. James was a great believer in depicting youth in realistic rather than sent...

Maisie don't need no education. She don't need no mind control, no dark sarcasm in the classroom—because she gets plenty of education without ever going to school. Adults several times discuss th...

Maisie is surrounded by lots of really terrible, horrible, no good, very bad people. This is the first thing we learn about her, in the preface. And the plot only thickens as we read on, meeting ad...

We know you've heard it before, but it's really true in What Maisie Knew: home is where the heart is. For Maisie, this means not just where her heart is since she loves Sir Claude just as much as s...

Which one of us hasn't felt left behind? This means that Maisie will speak to the little child in all of us who never got quite enough love, no matter how good we were or how hard we tried to earn...