After I finished my college thesis (The New Girl: Reconciling Femininity and Independence in American Girls' Fiction, 1895-1915), a number of books that I had downloaded for the project languished…. for more than a decade… and I have at long last decided that their time has come! Will be reviewing them in batches till they’re all gone.

I started with The Lonesomest Doll, a short and handsomely illustrated children’s book by Abbie Farwell Brown, the friend of Josephine Preston Peabody. The lonesomest doll is a sumptuous doll that has been given to a child Queen as a present… but the doll is far too costly to be played with, and spends most of the year stuffed away in storage.

But the porter’s daughter hears of the neglected doll, and one day when she finds her father’s misplaced keys, she sneaks into the castle to play with the poor thing. “She felt as if she were living in a fairy tale. There in front of her lay the enchanted castle, with the fair Princess [the doll] waiting to be wakened from her long loneliness. And Nichette herself was the Prince, who must wake her with a kiss.”

Then Nichette and the little Queen become friends, the Queen learns how to play, and then she gets briefly kidnapped by robbers who steal all of the doll’s costliest apparel. Now the doll is no longer too expensive to play with, and Nichette and the Queen play with her every day henceforth! HAPPY END.

Then I began Harriet Eliza Paine’s Chats with Girls on Self-Culture. I have a weakness for self-help books (I believe it was egelantier who said self-help books sell the fiction that everything will be all right? Sometimes that’s soothing), and there’s nothing as bracing as a self-help book from another time. Paine herself says it best: “the contact with minds differently trained from our own is an advantage. We discover what is real and what is merely traditional in our culture.”

The book covers a wide variety of topics: what books should you read? (Paine is aghast that many girls in this dread age of 1891 don’t like Sir Walter Scott. O tempora, o mores!) Which languages should you study? What should a dull girl do if she wants to culture herself? (I wish more self-help books included a chapter on “How to use this book if you’re basically bad at what it’s trying to teach you how to do.”) How should you choose your friends?

“The one law [of friendship] is to choose the best. But who are the best, - those who minister to us or those to whom we can minister?” Paine muses. Then, perceptively, she adds, “But what can be done about the friends that hinder? Isn’t it rather selfish, just for the sake of our own improvement, to cast off those who love us? That is the way many generous girls feel, though they may not like to say so to their parents or their teachers, who beg them to be more careful of their associates.”

Her advice is that, if you are a natural leader, then by all means feel free to try to be a good influence on those “friends that hinder.” If, on the other hand, you tend to be a follower who falls in with the ways of your closest associates, don’t fool yourself that this time the good influence you might have on your friend will outweigh the bad influence she will have on you.

However, no matter what your character, “The happiest friendships are not those where we take everything or give everything, but where we both give and take.”

And finally, I read Josephine Daskam Bacon’s Middle Aged Love Stories, which is, well, what it says on the tin. Bacon published this story collection a mere three years after Smith College Stories, which I found rather clunky, but those must have been important years for the development of her craft, for I found the characters in the later collection far better differentiated.

Like any short story collection, the quality here is variable. I think my favorite was “The Courting of Lady Jane,” wherein a middle-aged man decides he ought to get married and therefore asks his 22-year-old neighbor Jane, because he always enjoys visiting at her house so much! It’s so much fun to sit on the porch and chat with her mother! He’s so looking forward to sitting before the fire talking with her mother after the… oh wait. There will be no fireside chats with the mother? Because the mother won’t be living with them after the wedding? Oh. Oh no. Oh noooooooo…

MY DUDE YOU ARE SO STUPID but in, like, kind of an endearing way. And fortunately a young man appears at the psychological moment to capture Jane’s heart, so everyone gets paired off nicely. Happy end!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My Christmas reading has continued with L. Frank Baum’s The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, which I found quaintly delightful. This surprised me, because I didn’t enjoy The Wizard of Oz as a book: I felt it rather splintered into a series of disconnected anecdotes about halfway through. However, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus has a strong throughline: the titular life and adventures provide a central thread to tie together Baum’s lively inventiveness.

Charles Dickens’ The Cricket on the Hearth is also supposedly a Christmas story, or so at least I had been led to believe; I can only assume this is a misconception fanned by the Rankin Bass adaptation. The book in fact takes place in January, and contains no mention of Christmas at all, although there is a lot of cozy sitting by the hearth so I suppose I can see how people got confused.

I also finished a non-Christmas book: Janice P. Nishimura’s Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey from East to West and Back, research for the college girls books I’m working on (there are now two… one more and we can make it a hat trick?), but also delightful in its own right. In the 1870s, five Japanese girls (one only seven years old!) were sent to the United States to get American educations and bring back what they learned to Japan. Two were sent home early for ill health, but after an initial period of culture shock the other three thrived, and when they returned home to Japan, they eventually (again, after a period of culture shock) became instrumental in transforming Japanese women’s education. An absorbing, engagingly written history.

What I’m Reading Now

Judith Flanders’ Christmas: A Biography. This is not grabbing me like some of Flanders’ other books (Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England was more or less the book that got me hooked on the nineteenth century when I was a wee teenager, so it’s probably expecting too much for anything to live up to that), but I was intrigued to learn that people have been complaining that Christmas has lost touch with its earlier, pious roots, and now revolves around secular merry-making, essentially since Christmas was a thing.

I’m rushing to finish my final reading challenge for the year: for “a book by a local author,” I’m reading Gene Stratton-Porter’s Freckles, another book about Gene Stratton-Porter’s beloved Limberlost swamp, also (like A Girl of the Limberlost) featuring a lonely, neglected child whose life is transformed by a love of natural history.

What I Plan to Read Next

The library is clearly not going to bring me Betty MacDonald’s Nancy and Plum this Christmas (sulky about this; the library had plenty of copies last year, I know because I shelved them with my own two hands, so I don’t know why they have only two now), but I have one last Christmas book to succor me: a mystery, Mary Kelly’s The Christmas Egg.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Enid Blyton’s The Secret Island, which scratched the Boxcar Children sized itch in my soul: four children escape an untenable home situation to create for themselves a delightful home in the wilderness.

I also completed Unnatural Death, which has only reaffirmed my belief that the non-Harriet Lord Peter novels are not nearly as good, although I plan to plow ahead regardless.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m nearing the end of The Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. Lots of good stuff here about illegitimacy rates in Revolutionary War-era New England; lots of women giving birth within a few months (sometimes a few days) of their wedding, and not an insignificant quantity who have an illegitimate child and get married a few years later, maybe to the father and maybe not. Often women from comfortable families, too, including one of Martha’s daughters - this wasn’t just a matter of the poverty-stricken.

It’s interesting how at odd this pattern is not only with modern views of the monolithic past, but even from the popular novels of seduction at the time. Ulrich notes that many of these novels were published in the US, written by American authors, following the English model that assumes the seduction will destroy the seduced girl - and people ate it up even though it was at odds with the lived reality in America, or at least in New England. Was it even the reality in England? Perhaps just among the gentry?

It occurs to me that these novels may in fact have made the plight of the seduced girl worse, by making everyone expect that her plight would be wretched and therefore making that fate harder to escape.

I’ve already begun research for my next essay about female literary friendship (this time: Annie Fellows Johnston, writer of the Little Colonel books, and her Louisville writing group), which means that I’ve dived into George Madden Martin’s children’s book Emmy Lou: Her Book and Heart, first published in 1902. (George Madden Martin was a penname for a woman whose given name may have been Georgia May, but the internet is not quite clear about this.

Naturally what I’d really like is a book with a dedication like “To my writing group! You guys are great!” (only more Edwardian and flowery). This is not that book, but I’m enjoying (in a horrified way) this tale of Emmy Lou’s school days: she’s in a class of seventy and they spend their days droning through the primer in unison, mat, cat, bat, etc.

Oh! And Odysseus just slaughtered the suitors and also the maids who slept with them (which seems kind of hard on the maids, I mean you slept with Calypso for seven years, Odysseus), and it was way more violent than Wishbone led me to expect. And now he’s all “People are going to be mad about how I slaughtered all the suitors” and it’s like… well, if even the people in your own culture don’t approve, why did you do it, Odysseus? Why not just kick them out of the house and demand they send you herds of cattle to replenish your stock and maybe raid them if they don’t comply?

What I Plan to Read Next

Now that I’ve listened to both the Iliad and the Odyssey, I’m contemplating whether I should give the Aeneid a go too… although I did lose some enthusiasm for this plan when I realized that Dan Stevens hasn’t read it for audiobook. Still, it might be worth doing? There’s an audiobook read by Simon Callow.

(I realized only as I was looking up Simon Callow that for years I have conflated him and Simon Cowell. Sorry, Simon Callow! You’ve probably never berated a reality TV contestant in your life.)

I reread Shirley Marchalonis’s College Girls: A Century in Fiction last week. I read it ages ago for my college thesis project, but the number of out of copyright works available online have burgeoned in the years since and it occurred to me that I could, perhaps, find many of the books Marchalonis mentions on Google books and read them during slow times at the library.

(This has indeed proved true, although there are odd gaps. Why does Google books have Betty Wales, Freshman and Betty Wales, Senior but not either of the books in between? Especially when I’m almost sure they were available when I was in college… but maybe I got them through interlibrary loan.)

Book recommendations aside, I quite like this book - it’s very readable, which academic books sometimes aren’t - but I do find it a bit frustrating this time around that she doesn’t do more to situate the changes in books about women’s colleges in the wider context of a growing cultural attack on women’s spaces and women’s organization and even just the basic idea that women’s relationships with each other could be based on anything but competition over men - which was part of a backlash against the fact that women had made great strides: women’s colleges were established, women high school graduates actually outnumbered men, women were inching into ever more professions…

Here’s a fun fact: according to Three Girls in a Flat, the Chicago World’s Fair Commission agreed to let the Board of Lady Managers appoint all-female juries to judge women’s industrial work - and then hastily backtracked when they discovered that women were employed in almost every industry.

Three Girls in a Flat also enthuses “the World's Fair will present the most remarkable display of women's work that has ever been made public, and the heretofore unrepresented factory woman will receive her due share of credit for the work she has done.” I don’t know if this happened at the fair itself, but if it did it was promptly forgotten again thereafter.

I’ve come around to the viewpoint that women have been doing almost everything since practically forever and yet every generation has to rediscover this fact. In 1893 women were factory workers and writers and painters and sculptors* and architects and businesswomen and college professors and college presidents and doctors and nurses and social reformers and preachers - yes! preachers! in only a few of the more liberal churches, but still.

Yet each generation forgets, and thinks the women before them never did anything but sew and have babies, because the received narrative, mostly created by men, mostly overwrites these women out of existence - and when it can’t, presents them as exceptions. We aren’t taught that smart and brave and enterprising and creative are things that women just are.

Anyway. I think the big shift in the portrayal of women’s colleges in novels comes down to backlash against all this terrifying public achievement. Marchalonis mentions aspects of this but doesn’t really dig into it or tie the elements of the backlash together, so within her book it remains somewhat mysterious why earlier women’s college books are so rosy and later ones so negative - and also why co-ed colleges, which had existed in large numbers since the 1870s (my own alma mater was co-ed since its founding in 1847, represent!) but rarely the subject of books for girls, suddenly surged in literary popularity in the 1920s.

Well of course they did. If you’re going to posit heterosexuality as the highest and only possible fulfillment of a girl’s life, she’s got to have boys to be heterosexual with, now doesn’t she?


*Enid Yandell, one of the authors of Three Girls in a Flat was part of a team of women sculptors who worked on the World’s Fair. They were called the White Rabbits because when the head of sculpture at the fair asked for permission to hire women, fair director Daniel Burnham told him he could “hire anyone, even white rabbits, if they can get the work done.”

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Deborah Ellis’s My Name is Parvana, the final Breadwinner book. In some ways I didn’t think it was quite as good as the others - the construction is a little shakier - but on the other hand it was just so satisfying to see ( Spoilers ), and it has completely the perfect last line, so.

And Jewell Parker Rhodes Sugar, which is part of her Louisiana Girls trilogy along with Bayou Magic. I therefore expected it to have magic too, but it doesn’t, unless the magic of interracial friendship counts… which actually it might in a novel set in 1870.

It’s been five years since slavery ended, but Sugar and her mama remained on the old sugar plantation, waiting for Sugar’s daddy to come home. But now Sugar’s mama is dead, and most of the other young families have moved away, which leaves only Sugar and a bunch of old people to bring in the sugar harvest until the plantation owner sends out to hire Chinese workers.

Now on the one hand, I suspect this book offers a fairly rosy view of race relations. But on the other, it’s totally charming to watch Sugar win over everyone (the plantation owner’s son, the Chinese workers, eventually to a certain extent the plantation owner and his wife) through sheer force of personality and chutzpah. I particularly liked the scene where one of the Chinese workers teaches Sugar how to write her name in Chinese.

I also read Madeleine L’Engle’s Friends for the Journey, which I enjoyed, but much more mildly than I expected; it didn’t go nearly as deep into the topic as many of her other books do, possibly because it was co-written with her friend Luci Shaw. Although from a certain point of view, you might expect that to make it deeper? But no.

What I’m Reading Now

I'm almost done with Adeline Dutton Whitney’s A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite’s Life, in which young Leslie spends the summer at a mountain resort and learns important lessons about how to live a good life pleasing to God. (I realize this makes it sound completely airless but I promise it is not Elsie Dinsmore: The Yankee Mountain Edition.)

Along the way, Leslie reforms Sin (short for Asenath) Saxon, a mischievous high-spirited boarding school girl who has been using her sparkling wit to tease the good-hearted spinster next door. Naturally, by the end of the book she has realized that the kindly spinster is actually a wonderful person, and it’s better to use your wit to make people happy than torment the life out of them (although said spinster has actually found Sin’s antics enormously amusing; still, the next one might not be so understanding), and arranges a pleasure jaunt for a pair of sisters who have been much left out of the social life at the hotel that summer.

I have noticed that in nineteenth-century literature buoyant tomboyish girls generally stand a better chance of redemption than the girls who are “too girly” - that is, too interested in clothes and being seen in the right society and, worst of all, boys. The tomboys reform but the snobs remain snobs till the end, gently sighed at by the narrative but generally unrepentant.

And I’m still reading Paula McLain’s Love and Ruin. I’ve gotten to the Love part: Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway have fallen into each other’s arms during the Spanish Civil War. I figure we’ve got maybe a hundred pages before Ruin sets in hardcore, although both Gellhorn and Hemingway can already see its shadow even at the dawn of their relationship.

What I Plan to Read Next

My reading challenge for September is “a book recommended by a librarian or indie bookseller,” so I’d better have a chat with one of my coworkers about that.

I finished reading A. T. Dudley’s At the Home Plate, which is one of a series of sports stories that I inherited from my great-great-uncles. (In fact I believe it’s the last of the series. I am not sure why I read it first.)

It’s moderately amusing if you’re interested in books from the early twentieth century, but in the end I think my great-great-aunts had better taste in literature: they received the Little Colonel series for their Christmas presents, and not only can I reliably tell all the characters apart (by no means an assured feat in A. T. Dudley), but I have strong feelings about many of them. My mother and I once got into a shipping argument about Lloyd’s eventual paramour, who is eminently suitable - I cannot argue that he’s not suitable - but it’s just so bloodless: she chooses him by gazing at him and totting up all his virtues that would make him a good husband.

But at the same time there is not really another contender - they have been knocked out by going on a gambling spree, falling in with Demon Alcohol, or being kind of controlling - and Lloyd’s vocation is clearly to be a great hostess and leader of society, for which one needs a husband, so there you are.

This idea of vocation is actually quite important in these books; the main characters discuss it seriously, and they end up with a wide range: Lloyd is a hostess, but there’s also an illustrator, a writer (Johnston’s readers seem to have identified her, semi-correctly, as a self-insert), a social worker, and a homemaker (which is a distinct calling from hostess: it implies less wider responsibility). I liked the range, and the fact that all these vocations are treated as fine and noble callings (not all women need to follow the same life path!), and the fact that many of them don’t get married and that’s just fine. In fact there are important single women throughout the books - and important married women - plenty of female mentors for these girls all round.

I could have written so much more about these books in my senior thesis had I but thought of it at the time.

I really think the Little Colonel series might have the same kind of continued popularity as the Anne of Green Gables books - except that they’re so darn racist. And not in the way where the author used a racial slur or two but the book would be fine if you cut a couple lines. The racism is baked into the premise: there are scenes and thematic points that revolve around it. The glowingly patriotic take on the Spanish-American War is irremovable.

It’s a crying shame that Johnston could be so thoughtful and compassionate about some things and so completely wrong on others, but so it goes, I suppose.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Betsy and Tacy Go Over the Big Hill and Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown. You know, every once in a while I will read a children’s book and get disheartened, because it’s not grabbing me and I feel like maybe I’ve outgrown children’s books and that’s just sad… but rereading the Betsy-Tacy books has reminded me that while it’s possible to outgrow particular children’s books (just as it’s possible to outgrow particular adult books), the best ones are always worth reading.

I particularly enjoyed Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, because there is an entire chapter devoted to Betsy going to the library, all by herself, to spend a whole day there, with fifteen cents so she can have lunch at the cafe across the street. Doesn’t that sound wonderful? That would have been my dream when I was twelve.

Also Depression 101, because the library didn't have "My life is a disaster and I have failed at everything that matters."

I nearly threw the book at the wall when it suggested accepting invitations when I receive them - it would be nice to live in that alternate universe where my friends invited me to things, now wouldn't it? - but, well. I've read mental health memoirs; I know there's always a section about If Only I Had Sought Help Sooner, I Could Have Started Water-Skiing on the French Riviera That Much Earlier, I Would Say Woe Is Me But My Therapist Recommended That I Not Dwell on Past Mistakes.

What I’m Reading Now

Sara Jeannette Duncan's A Daughter of To-day. Why is The Imperialist her most famous work (for very low values of "most famous")? The Imperialist is super boring. (The imperialist in a lengthy rumination about Canada's colonial ties to Britain, thinly disguised as a novel.) A Daughter of To-day is totally charming. The heroine Elfrida is studying painting in the Latin Quarter in Paris! Just look at her breakfast:

There was the egg, and there was some apricot-jam - the egg in a slender-stemmed Arabian silver cup, the jam golden in a little round dish of wonderful old blue. She set it forth, with the milk-bread and the butter and the coffee, on a bit of much mended damask with a pattern of roses and a coronet in one corner. Her breakfast gave her several sorts of pleasure.

Don't you want to have that breakfast?

What I Plan to Read Next

It was going to be Heaven to Betsy, except… the library doesn’t have it! I’ve requested it by interlibrary loan, of course, but I’m just boggled that they have every book in the series except one of the middle ones. Who does that??

The Betsy-Tacy books hitherto have all been rereads; this is the first one that I’ll be reading for the first time.

I finished reading L. M. Montgomery’s Mistress Pat, which I - enjoyed might be the wrong word for a book where I kept cringing in recognition as the heroine enacted all my greatest faults: aversion to change, intense grudge-holding over petty things, clinging to old relationships long after it is obvious that those relationships have changed beyond recognition.

Pat clings to the idea that she and her brother Sid might grow old and single together, like Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, long after it becomes clear that Sid's definitely going to marry someone someday. I think Sid's portrayal is one of the weakest parts of the book: I never could see what Pat sees in him, which left me with the impression that she was clinging to a halcyon period of companionship that happened when she was about seven.

She's a vivid portrayal of that kind of person, though.

The book gave me a bit of whiplash at the end. It sails along its smoothly domestic round for most of the book - Pat and her sister Rae and their housekeeper Judy Plum, with some help from other family members, care for their beautiful home, Silver Bush - and then ends with “Rocks fall, everybody dies!” abruptness.

Not literally. One one person dies, and that’s actually before the super-abrupt ending. But I definitely got the sense that Montgomery realized that she had no idea how to draw this to a close, having firmly established that Pat was never going to leave Silver Bush ever, even if she kind of maybe sort of has feelings for her childhood friend Hilary. I was already sick of Pat/Hilary hundreds of pages before Pat and Hilary ever got together, just because it was so telegraphed.

Then at the end of the book they did get together, not long at all after Pat’s beloved home Silver Bush burns down - beloved doesn’t fully encompass Pat’s obsession with this house; it is her reason for living and the succor of her soul and when it burns, she feels that all light has gone out of the world.

And then Hilary shows up and kisses her and Pat, who has been firmly convinced that Hilary is nothing but a friend, instantly realizes that actually there is some light in the world and that light is LOVE, and Hilary is love, and they’re going to get married and move across the continent to a house that Hilary already built for them both, back before Pat agreed to marry him and was in fact pretty much wedded to Silver Bush.

I don’t think the book means for us to believe that Hilary burned Silver Bush down, having realized that the house was his only true rival (and hiding his hatred of it behind protestations that it was the most beautiful house ever, because of course if he didn’t pretend to love it, Pat would never love him), but certainly the timing feels suspicious.

I’m just imagining the first years of their married life consisting of a lot of sitting in front of the fire in their house on the other side of the continent, with Pat reminiscing about the lost beautiful days of Silver Bush and blinking back tears, and Hilary silently grinding his teeth because even now that his rival is dead, it still occupies all of Pat’s thoughts, god damn it.

But of course out loud he can only say, “Yes, dear, Silver Bush was quite wonderful. Let’s spend yet another five fucking hours reminiscing about your lost home, which you will always love more than me,” even though really he’d rather stab his eyes out.

What I've Just Finished Reading

L. M. Montgomery's The Golden Road, the sequel to The Story Girl, which I actually ended up preferring to the original; I'm not sure if it's because it seems less episodic, with the Story Girl's stories better folded into the narrative, or if it's because I read it on vacation and that adds a charm to everything.

Also - drumroll, please! - I finished Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks! Which I still think was a bit padded, and rather oddly shaped (the first two thirds of the book are about Miss Marjoribanks triumphant return to her hometown, and then abruptly there's a jump ten years into the future), but it was nonetheless enjoyable if you like this sort of thing, which I do.

Miss Marjoribanks herself is, IMO, the crowning achievement of the book: a formidable woman, self-assured, insightful, with a firm sense of her own importance; quite certain of her goals and how to reach them, but also willing to bend her plans as the need arises. The narrative notes repeatedly that if she had been a boy, she would have made a capital lawyer or doctor or member of Parliament. But she's a girl, and an exceptionally conventional one at that, and although she occasionally sighs about the narrow sphere for her ambitions, she's not in any kind of revolt against it.

I don't think I've read of another character who combined all those traits into one person before, and given how much I've read, that's rare in itself. The combination is both novel and fascinating.

I also read Elizabeth Gaskell's Lizzie Leigh, and I'm beginning to think that Cranford is the only Gaskell book for me, because I don't seem to enjoy any of her more "let's take on this social problem" works, and that seems to be most of her other stories. Lizzie Leigh is in many ways a reaction against early Victorian moralism: the heroine was a servant who lost her position after having sex and, it is heavily implied, fell into prostitution, and rather than die horribly as anyone might expect, she ends up going home to live with her loving mother in a bucolic cottage. (Her illegitimate daughter still bites the dust, though.)

But it's a very early Victorian rejection of early Victorian moralism, more like a tract than a story, and it wasn't to my taste.

What I'm Reading Now

The Martian, which I'm actually enjoying a lot. I suspect that seeing it after the movie actually enhances it a bit: I've brought the movie characterization to the experience, so I don't so much notice the flatness to the characterization that is the most common criticism I've seen of the book, and the book fleshes out a lot of the technical details in the movie.

What I Plan to Read Next

Marie Brennan's Voyage of the Basilisk.

I didn't actually write, in my project about turn-of-the-twentieth century girls' fiction, that I liked reading these books in part because they are sometimes very, very gay, but sometimes they really really really are. My current case in point is Annie Fellowes Johnston’s Georgina’s Service Stories, which is filled with the glory, GLORY in Georgina’s giant ridiculous crush on Esther.

Naturally it ends badly, because Johnston is of the opinion that one should fall in love slowly and deliberately, after due consideration of the other party’s character, and preferably to a childhood friend. But before that we get oceans of Georgina’s crush and afterward there is lots of WALLOWING IN ANGST, and it is basically like crack for me, CRACK.

When Georgina first meets Esther, she rhapsodizes that the other girl is “a blonde with the most exquisite hair, the color of amber of honey, with little gold crinkles in it. And her eyes - well, they make you think of clear blue sapphires. I loved her from the moment Judith introduced us. Loved her smile, the way it lights up her face, and her voice, soft and slow...”

Georgina is inspired. Why not write a poem for this seraph of beauty? "At that, a whole list of lovely words went slipping through my mind like beads along a string: lily... pearl... snow-crystal... amber... blue-of-deep-waters... blue-of-sapphire-skies... heart of gold. She makes me think of such fair and shining things."

Naturally, Georgina nicknames this fair and shining girl "Star." “She is so wonderful that it is a privilege just to be in the same town with her,” Georgina sighs, and she tries “to live each hour in a way that is good for my character, so as to make myself as worthy as possible of her friendship. For instance, I dust the hind legs of the piano and the backs of the picture frames as conscientiously as the parts that show.”

Even when storm clouds begin to gather, Georgina holds fast to her love. "It is simply that love gives me a clearer vision than the others have - the power to see the halo of charm which encircles her," Georgina reflects, clinging desperately to her vision of Esther's high and shining soul.

But it all comes to nought! Esther is already engaged to someone else and is flirting with all the boys in town just to amuse herself by breaking their hearts. "I wished I could have died before I found out that she wasn't all I believed her to be," Georgina sobs - and I mean really sobs; she goes home, falls down on a couch, can't cry for a while because her heart is so absolutely wrung, but then weeps till she gets a sick headache.

And then World War I happens and Georgina learns important lessons about Patriotism etc. etc., and it's much less breathlessly gushing - even the part where she falls in love with her childhood BFF Richard is less gushing than her rhapsodies about Esther. (Incidentally, Georgina first noticed that her childhood BFF had grown into a hunk when Esther mentioned it. I am just saying.) So I kind of lost interest after Esther broke Georgina's heart, but the first third of the book is GLORIOUS.