Little women  Elaine Showalter applauds Hilary Mantel's return
to the stories of her childhood in Learning to Talk Learning to
Talk by Hilary Mantel  Learning to Talk by Hilary Mantel 176pp,
Fourth Estate, £6.99  There have always been clever girls who
felt that being a child was an indignity and a burden, that they
were condemned to years of boredom, irritation, and the
endurance of petty tyranny, because they were young, small, and
female. Charlotte Brontë was among the first; like Brontë, such
girls often grow up to be writers. Susan Sontag, for example,
has written about the anger she felt in "serving out my long
prison sentence of childhood". Hilary Mantel is another angry
ex-child; in Learning to Talk, she observes that "there should
be a support programme, a 12-step programme, for young people
who hate being young".  Writing has been Mantel's 12-step
programme, through which she has confronted a Manchester
childhood that "was a sort of gulag", not harsh, but
authoritarian and absurd. Earlier this year,