The Little Prisoner

April 14, 2008
“The charts are full of stories of childhood abuse now,” Elliott writes, and speculates that fans of childhood abuse literature “want to be shocked at the start of the book, crying in the middle and exultant at the end.” Her account (Jane Elliott is a pseudonym) adds little that is fresh to the genre beyond that her “eventeen years was an astonishingly long time to have been systematically abused.” A good part of this “true story of a four-year-old girl who fell into the power of a man for whom evil was a relentless daily activity” is devoted to the shock—graphic detail of her stepfather’s physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Some readers will feel for Elliott as she continues to be victimized by a thoroughly amoral lunatic head of an incredibly dysfunctional family; others may find that the explicit detail teeters perilously close to the pornography of violence and of sexual degradation. While Elliott’s stepfather is eventually sentenced to 15 years, little exultancy follows until Elliott decides to tell her story and achieves British bestsellerdom. Elliott’s account, written with Crofts, makes fascinating reading as one wonders, in page-turner fashion, whether anyone will stop this man from terrorizing his stepdaughter, her mother, her siblings and the entire neighborhood. The vagueness of time and place, however, raise disquieting questions about reality.