Left Out presents an alternative and corrective history of writing for children in the first half of the twentieth century. While there are many dedicated studies of children’s literature and childrens’ writers working in other periods, the years 1910-1949 have previous received little attention. Through readings of the large body of work that was sidelined and/or denigrarted in the period between the wars, Kimberley Reynolds shows that the accepted characterisation of inter-war children’s literature as retreatist, anti-modernist, and apolitical is too sweeping and that the relationship between children’s literature and modernism, left-wing politics, and progressive education has been neglected.