Betsy and the Great World by Maud Hart Lovelace

If anything, technology has only increased the popularity of the books. I think the best of the books is Betsy in Spite of Herself, because it gives such a vivid picture of the ways young women are tempted to mold themselves in some uncomfortable image and likeness.” Her relationship with her boyfriend and eventual husband, Joe Willard, is between equals. “The linchpin of Betsy’s life is her friendship with her friends Tacy and Tib. “These are female-empowerment books,” she says. Betsy, along with Little Women’s Jo and Anne of Green Gables, showed Quindlen that a woman could make her living as a writer. As Quindlen points out, the mores of the two girls may be antediluvian, but their goals are modern. They are among the fans who essentially demanded that Lovelace’s later books be reprinted (the first four have been in continuous production since publication). “These books allow them to slip back into a world where it wasn’t expected.”Ĭabot, novelist and columnist Anna Quindlen, and crime writer Laura Lippman have each written a foreword to one of the three reissues from HarperCollins (the reissues comprise the last six Betsy-Tacy books). Plenty of girls today “are freaked out about sex,” Cabot says.

In an age when teenagers openly discuss blow jobs, she found Betsy’s concerns about, say, holding hands with boys oddly empowering. Author Meg Cabot first read Lovelace’s books while writing The Princess Diaries.

But otherwise the same!Ĭertainly the pressures Betsy and her friends faced were as emotionally mind-boggling to them as the ones facing young women today. And, okay, no Lady Gaga cameos or gay men or fornication. Think Serena and Blair of Gossip Girl with lower hemlines and smaller budgets. In ten novels, Lovelace followed turn-of-the-century best friends Betsy Ray and Tacy Kelly from age 5 to their respective weddings. Maud Hart Lovelace’s books were old-fashioned even when they started coming out in 1940.

Betsy and the Great World by Maud Hart Lovelace