The Twelve and the Genii
Front cover of first edition
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| Author | Pauline Clarke |
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| Illustrator | Cecil Leslie |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Children's fantasy novel |
| Publisher | Faber and Faber |
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Publication date
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1962 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 185 pp (first edition) |
| OCLC | 559665894 |
| LC Class | PZ8.C552 Tw PZ8.C552 Re2 |
The Twelve and the Genii, or The Return of the Twelves in the U.S., is a low fantasy novel for children by Pauline Clarke, first published by Faber in 1962 with illustrations by Cecil Leslie. It features a young boy and "what might have happened if the lost toy soldiers that once belonged to the Brontë children had ever been found again".
Clarke and The Twelve won the annual Carnegie Medal recognising the year's best children's book by a British subject. Six years later she won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis for the German-language edition, Die Zwölf vom Dachboden (Berlin: Dressler, 1968).
Coward–McCann published the first U.S. edition in 1964, under new title The Return of the Twelves with new illustrations by Bernarda Bryson.
"The Twelve" of the title are wooden soldiers that may come to life. "The Genii" are their protective spirits, from 1826 four Brontë children, now joined by Max and his sister Jane Morley.
The twelve toy soldiers once belonged to Branwell Brontë and his sisters. They were given to Branwell, the fourth of six children and only boy, by their father in 1826. The two eldest girls had died the preceding year and the four surviving children were 6 to 10 years old; they made the soldiers the centre of their imaginative life and their childhood literary efforts.
Max is an eight-year-old boy whose family has just moved into an old farmhouse in Yorkshire. He discovers some old toy soldiers in the attic and is surprised and delighted to find that they come to life. The soldiers, known as the Twelves, or the Young Men, have different personalities; they are brave, intelligent and very independent, not to mention argumentative. They adopt Max as one of their Genii, or protective spirits, and he begins to spend most of his time watching and thinking about them. He learns from the local parson that they once belonged to the Brontës, who wrote stories about their adventures. When his older sister Jane discovers the secret, she becomes as keen on the soldiers as Max is.
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