Posthumous childhood...

...Daring Daisy Ashford, the Greatest Ever Nine-Year-Old Novelist

In the Chicago Tribune in July 1919, she said, “I’m afraid my literary genius—such as it was—lapsed with my schooldays.” Barrie doesn’t seem to find this surprising. He closely associates a talent for synthesizing reality into fiction with childhood, because once a person is initiated into the adult world, she never again pays as close attention to it. He describes how Ashford “gives me a few particulars of this child she used to be, and is evidently a little scared by her.”