osprey_archer (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer) wrote2023-01-03 09:36 pm
osprey_archer) wrote2023-01-03 09:36 pm
Book Review: The Little Colonel’s Chum: Mary Ware
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Annie Fellows Johnston wrote the wildly popular ten-book Little Colonel series, which feature the adventures of Lloyd Sherman, a Kentucky girl with a fiery temper, and her many (many) (MANY) friends and beaux.
One of those friends is Joyce Ware, a budding young artist whose family is in straitened circumstances due to the death of her father and her mother’s ill health. Joyce has a younger sister named Mary, a freckle-faced girl fascinated by natural history, and The Little Colonel’s Chum: Mary Ware is the beginning of a spin-off trilogy centered on Mary but also liberally bedecked with updates on the life of all of the Little Colonel’s friends.
In college I read the ten books of the Little Colonel series for my American girl’s literature thesis, but I ran out of time on the Mary Ware books, and since then they’ve just languished. But I decided it was time to get rid of the series (I inherited a complete set, which successive generations had loved to death - literally these books are falling apart), and I thought, well, as a last hurrah I’ll read the Mary Ware books in my great-great aunt Ruth Montgomery’s original copies.
When her trilogy starts, Mary Ware is a girl of sixteen, just starting at boarding school. She is, in fact, starting at the boarding school that Lloyd Sherman herself attended, and goes into raptures of delight when she discovers she’s been assigned Lloyd’s former room, because she just adores the Little Colonel.
Mary hangs a photograph of Lloyd on the wall and has little chats with it. This is a book full of Significant Photographs: one of Lloyd’s other friends, Betty Lewis, is now a teacher at the boarding school, and one of Mary’s classmates keeps Betty’s photo on her wall: “She was my crush all my Freshman year,” she explains.
As well as the girl crushes, we have boarding school hijinks, Mary’s visit to her sister Joyce and Joyce’s three artist roommates (one of whom calls herself a “bachelor maid”), Mary’s crush on a boy (partly because she knows that he also likes Lloyd! Oh child)...
And then Mary’s good times are cut short by a development that shocked and appalled me! A mine shaft collapses on Mary’s generous, sunny brother Jack, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down! Mary rushes home to help care for him. (There won’t be money for her to continue her studies next year anyway; Jack was the family breadwinner.) It’s just so dreadfully unfair! And Jack, like Mary's classmates, also has a photograph of Betty that he’s been dreaming over, and now he’s going to have to set those dreams aside forever…
Okay, I have hopes that in the next book it will turn out that he is not, in fact, paralyzed forever, or possibly that he will realize that since he’s still gainfully employed (he’s gotten a desk job at the mines) he can in fact support a wife, BUT NONETHELESS THIS WAS SUCH A MEAN THING TO DO TO JACK and indeed the entire Ware family, who have been through so much over this series! Jack was finally fulfilling his dream of supporting the family, and sending Mary to boarding school, and now that Joyce no longer needed to send so much of her earnings home she was thinking about continuing her art studies in Paris… oh Annie Fellows Johnston, how could you do them so dirty?
One of those friends is Joyce Ware, a budding young artist whose family is in straitened circumstances due to the death of her father and her mother’s ill health. Joyce has a younger sister named Mary, a freckle-faced girl fascinated by natural history, and The Little Colonel’s Chum: Mary Ware is the beginning of a spin-off trilogy centered on Mary but also liberally bedecked with updates on the life of all of the Little Colonel’s friends.
In college I read the ten books of the Little Colonel series for my American girl’s literature thesis, but I ran out of time on the Mary Ware books, and since then they’ve just languished. But I decided it was time to get rid of the series (I inherited a complete set, which successive generations had loved to death - literally these books are falling apart), and I thought, well, as a last hurrah I’ll read the Mary Ware books in my great-great aunt Ruth Montgomery’s original copies.
When her trilogy starts, Mary Ware is a girl of sixteen, just starting at boarding school. She is, in fact, starting at the boarding school that Lloyd Sherman herself attended, and goes into raptures of delight when she discovers she’s been assigned Lloyd’s former room, because she just adores the Little Colonel.
Mary hangs a photograph of Lloyd on the wall and has little chats with it. This is a book full of Significant Photographs: one of Lloyd’s other friends, Betty Lewis, is now a teacher at the boarding school, and one of Mary’s classmates keeps Betty’s photo on her wall: “She was my crush all my Freshman year,” she explains.
As well as the girl crushes, we have boarding school hijinks, Mary’s visit to her sister Joyce and Joyce’s three artist roommates (one of whom calls herself a “bachelor maid”), Mary’s crush on a boy (partly because she knows that he also likes Lloyd! Oh child)...
And then Mary’s good times are cut short by a development that shocked and appalled me! A mine shaft collapses on Mary’s generous, sunny brother Jack, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down! Mary rushes home to help care for him. (There won’t be money for her to continue her studies next year anyway; Jack was the family breadwinner.) It’s just so dreadfully unfair! And Jack, like Mary's classmates, also has a photograph of Betty that he’s been dreaming over, and now he’s going to have to set those dreams aside forever…
Okay, I have hopes that in the next book it will turn out that he is not, in fact, paralyzed forever, or possibly that he will realize that since he’s still gainfully employed (he’s gotten a desk job at the mines) he can in fact support a wife, BUT NONETHELESS THIS WAS SUCH A MEAN THING TO DO TO JACK and indeed the entire Ware family, who have been through so much over this series! Jack was finally fulfilling his dream of supporting the family, and sending Mary to boarding school, and now that Joyce no longer needed to send so much of her earnings home she was thinking about continuing her art studies in Paris… oh Annie Fellows Johnston, how could you do them so dirty?