35. Maud Hart Lovelace — The Betsy-Tacy High School Books with Sadie Stein

AMY: Hey, everybody, welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off great books by forgotten women writers. I’m Amy Helmes, here with my writing partner Kim Askew, whom I did NOT have the pleasure of knowing as a teenager. Kim, what were you like back then?

KIM: I guess pretty much what you’d expect. My nose was always in a book. I was shy, gawky, annoyingly-well read, I’m sure. And I always felt as though I was waiting to be discovered, or something... I’m not sure by who. But how about you, Amy? 

AMY: I was gawky as well. I really felt intellectually superior to everyone else my age (of course I wasn’t). But physically, I was really skinny and mousy and still very baby-faced. I was completely terrified of boys. But luckily I had my two “ride or dies” — these were best friends whom I’d known since third grade. I’m still friends with them, so shout out to Michelle and Tricia, or “Woman” and “Tric,” as I still call them.

KIM: Right, I think I met them at your wedding!

AMY: Mm-hmm… they were my maids of honors. Matrons of honor, yes.

KIM: And you guys actually sound a lot like Betsy, Tacy and Tib from the books we’re going to be discussing today! Collectively, they’re known as the “Betsy-Tacy” books, and they were written by Maud Hart Lovelace. They trace the lives of three best friends growing up in Minnesota at the turn of the 20th century. And while they may not be quite as well known as the [Little House on the Prairie] or Anne of Green Gables coming-of-age books, Lovelace still has a very fervent fan base dedicated to preserving her legacy and keeping these wonderful books in print.

AMY: Yeah, I totally loved these books as a kid (I think they’re even better than the “Little House” books, frankly). Lovelace’s 10-book series follows title heroine Betsy and her friends from their kindergarten years through high school and beyond. And today we’re going to focus specifically on the four books set during the high school years. 

KIM: Right. And although they are classified under “children’s literature,” I definitely think you could argue that these were some of the earliest YA novels. Of course, the term “teenager” actually hadn’t been coined yet, but these books offer a window into what adolescence was like more than one hundred years ago. The times may have changed, but it’s safe to say the inner workings of the teenage mind really haven’t — not when it comes to the challenges of growing up. 

AMY: It made me so happy to go back and get better acquainted with these characters. It was like literary comfort food. And I think it’s safe to say that our special guest today is even more of a super fan.

KIM: I cannot wait to introduce her and dive into this. So let’s raid the stacks and get started!

[intro music]

KIM: Our guest today is Sadie Stein, a New York-based culture writer and editor. Her essays have been published in Elle Magazine, T Magazine, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times, among many others. Her style, aesthetic, and interests are comfortably placed at the intersection of vintage-cozy and incredibly chic. She’s written a defense of Maximalism and an ode to the butter roll, as well as a sheepish recommendation for the sub-genre of “Live Like a French Woman” books. I absolutely love everything she writes. We also want to refer you to her archives for an evergreen Besty-Tacy tribute essay, which was published in 2009 on Jezebel. We’ll share a link in our shownotes. Sadie, will you be our best friend for the day? 

SADIE: I would love to! Especially since I have not seen much of my own “Crowd” for the past year.

AMY: If we’re going to be Betsy, Tacy and Tib, I want to be Betsy.

SADIE: Everyone wants to be Betsy. It’s like everyone back in the day wanting to be Carrie Bradshaw or Jo March. No one wants to be the “Meg,” who’s kind of the Tacy, I guess.

KIM: You know what, I’ll be Tacy. [laughing]

AMY: Poor Tacy. Anyway, Sadie, I was so excited when you suggested that we do Maud Hart Lovelace for this episode. When did you first discover the Betsy-Tacy books, and what did you love about them?

SADIE: Well, I can tell you exactly when, because I was in second grade and the mother of a classmate of mine (if she’s listening, her name is Jackie Lynch) she gave me Betsy-Tacy, I think — the first one. She, herself, had loved them growing up, and she had three little boys, and I think wanted to share these books with a girl who’d be more into them. I was very bookish — that was kind of my thing. So she made me a present of this and it was the best gift, probably, anyone has ever given me because after that, I read all the others, and of course, as I got older, I read the high school and then post-high school books. I have probably re-read this body of work more than I have any other writers in the course of my life so far.

KIM: That is great. I love that. What a sweet gift, too, and what a thoughtful gift. My mom had a Besty-Tacy book on her bookshelf, and that was how I first began reading them. And it’s kind of funny, because when I was little, I actually imagined that was what her childhood was probably like. For one thing, she was born half a century later, and two, her childhood wasn’t anything like that, as I later learned. But it was a nice little story I told myself. Anyway, today, as we mentioned, we’ll be touching on the books that span Betsy’s high school years: Heaven To Betsy; Betsy in Spite of Herself; Betsy Was a Junior; and Betsy and Joe. Do you want to give our readers a quick overview, Sadie, about our girl, “Betsy” just to get us started? Who is she, and what’s she like?

SADIE: Well, Elizabeth Warrington Ray (Betsy to her friends and family) is a young teenager growing up in Minnesota. And these books span the years 1906 to 1910, because as we know, she’s Class of 1910. While the earlier books have dealt with her childhood, these books age with the reader into what we’d now call more YA prose. They’re at an older level. Betsy is herself, like the author, an aspiring writer. She’s friendly, likeable, but has a certain number of teenage problems and her biography is very much like that of the author Maud Hart Lovelace, who actually started out telling these stories to her young daughter about her life. Finally she thought, “Maybe I’ll try writing them up.” And she did, and in doing so, she actually drew pretty heavily on her journals of the time. So a lot of details are very similar. Not just the fact that Betsy, like Maud herself, is the second of three daughters and her father runs a shoe store, but details like the furs she gets for Christmas Junior year, the songs they play at the different dances. So the details are not just very evocative but really accurate, too, an exact moment of an era.

AMY: Right, so let’s go back and talk a little bit about the author. Maud Hart was born in the town of Mankato, Minnesota in 1892 and she spent the entirety of her youth there. (The family did eventually move to Minneapolis after she graduated from high school). But Betsy, in the book is a faithful depiction of Maud herself (as you said, Sadie) right down to the pronounced gap between her two front teeth. I’ve Googled pictures of Maud, and I don’t know if it’s just me, but she bears a striking resemblance, I think, to Jennifer Ehle from the BBC Pride & Prejudice. She’s got the high cheekbones and the porcelain skin, and she kind of wears her hair in that similar hairstyle that Elizabeth Bennett has in the movie. So every time I see a picture of her, I’m just like, “Oh! Jennifer Ehle!”

SADIE: She’d love that comparison, and as we know, she has the prettiest complexion in the Crowd. That’s one of her few (in her own mind) attainments, because she doesn’t consider herself conventionally pretty like some of the other girls. I think nowadays we’d say she’s kind of scrawny, which is one of the many things I identified with, I think. She likes being slender enough to wear some of the new styles, but she also has to supplement her figure sometimes with starched ruffles under her shirtwaist to get the required “Gibson Girl” silhouette.

AMY: With a few exceptions, really, the places and events from the book really do line up almost exactly with Maud’s real life. Can you give us a few more examples, Sadie, of where things really line up.

SADIE: Sure, well, just like Betsy and Tacy, the real-life “Tacy,” Frances “Bick” Kenney, lived across the street from Maud. They became friends at the age of five. And then the real-life “Tib” also joined their Triumvirate a couple of years later, and they all stayed friends their entire lives. And the boys she went out with… of course, everyone in “The Crowd” has a real-life counterpart. A couple of them are composites, but by-and-large they have pretty exact counterparts, and also, they look just like the characters. If you look them up, it’s very satisfying. They really look just the way you imagine them, and that’s also a tribute to Vera Neville’s illustrations, because I imagine she studied the pictures, too. But it’s so evocative, and it’s that’ rare case where your imaginings exactly map onto the reality.

KIM: And also, just as Betsy was basically writing from the second she could hold a pencil, so was Maud. She had her first booklet of poetry printed up at the age of 10, and she competed in her high school’s yearly essay contests (just as Betsy does). She went on to attend the University of Minnesota, too. During that time she took a brief sabbatical to visit her grandmother in California where she ended up selling her first short story to The Los Angeles Times. 

AMY: It had something to do with a murder on a streetcar, which is pretty unexpected if you only know the Betsy-Tacy books! It just is so different.

SADIE: She tries to write these very lurid stories and kind of Little Women-style. People keep being like, “Why don’t you just write what you know?” And she’s like, “No, no, no… I want it to be about people in a Fifth Avenue mansion… I want murder and mayhem.” And then of course, not ironically, in the end it would be these stories which she didn’t think were glamorous or exciting enough that would make her name as a writer and that people loved so much. And the others, of course, just seem kind of goofy and dated.

AMY: Right. Okay, so Maud, when she was 25-years-old, she fell in love with a fellow writer by the name of Delos Lovelace. I think it’s pronounced “Dee-lohs”...? Any thoughts?

SADIE: She called him “DeLossie.” And this is where I actually hope someone from the Betsy-Tacy Society will weigh in and tell us the right way to say it, because in his time he was a pretty well-known magazine writer. So presumably there’s some trail of lore that can tell us exactly how this would be pronounced.

AMY: Okay, so let’s call him “DeLoss.” I’m convinced maybe, given that nickname. He is the basis for Joe Willard, who is Betsy’s most important love interest in the books. And although Delos did not grow up or go to high school with Maud, she managed to work him into the book by creating this character, which I thought was really great. 

KIM: After they married, they moved to New York (where Delos was working as a newspaper reporter). Maud wrote a handful of short stories for magazines, and she collaborated with her husband in the 1920s on them. And then about five years before her daughter, Merian, was born, she published a book called The Black Angels; it was one of several adult historical novels that she wrote. Betsy-Tacy -- which School Library Journal ranked at number 52 on their list of 100 best children’s novels ever — came out in 1940. Lovelace never intended for it to become a series, but readers just kept begging her for more, no surprise, and she happily obliged, publishing just about one book a year in this series for the next decade. (There were also several spinoff books.) The final book that you mentioned, Sadie, Betsy’s Wedding, came out in 1955. She wrote 18 children’s books when all was said and done. 

AMY: Lovelace said, “I lived the happiest childhood a child could possibly know” and honestly, based on these books, she’s not lying at all. Everyone in these novels is so happy and earnest and kind. There’s no real intense drama, and what drama there is ends up being quickly and lovingly resolved for the most part. It does make me think that maybe a series like this could not get published today. It also makes me wonder why these books about the typical goings-on in the life of a typical American girl are so captivating. Sadie, what’s your take on this? What’s the special sauce here? 

SADIE: I mean, they’re so idyllic as you say, but they don’t have the creepy idealized quality of, like, the Emily of New Moon books, I was thinking of, or even the later Anne of Green Gables books where there’s no humor at all and she’s too perfect to be relatable. I think there’s a combination of taking a young person’s small problems seriously without taking herself too seriously as a character. So she’s very relatable and very likeable. And, of course, there’s the fact that it’s this great snapshot of another era, which is very nostalgic, even when she wrote it in the Forties. The food, the interiors, the outfits are all really satisfyingly described. I don’t know a better way to put it except that there’s sort of the cozy pleasure that you can get from reading a good cookbook, almost. And then, too, there’ s just the pleasure that comes with any saga where you get to stay and live with characters for, in this case, 10 books. You really get to know them, they become friends and you miss them when they’re gone. She had wanted to write one called Betsy’s Bettina about having a child, and it couldn’t gel. One could speculate about why: It took a very long time for them to have a child. They were older parents (especially by the standards of the day) and they lost at least one pregnancy, so it was probably fraught. It would have been hard to idealize some of that in the same way, although they adored their daughter. But I think these early years, in particular, she did not need to do that. It was (if pretty rosy) in other ways a very faithful recollection. And the fact that she could use the diaries means they have a very vivid quality. The parameters of the world are very safe, so you know nothing really bad will happen. She’s got this loving, very stable family and this very emotionally-safe space and physically-safe place, and you know all that. You’re anchored in it. And that allows you, in some ways, to get invested in the smallness of the problems the way you have the luxury of doing when you’re a child. 

KIM: Yeah, and it’s just that comfort level. I think what you said is exactly right — that feeling that it is safe and you can enjoy it without worrying that something terrible is going to happen. But it also feels real enough with the details that you can immerse yourself in it. So Heaven to Betsy kicks things off at the start of Betsy’s freshman year. In the first chapter it’s the end of summer and Betsy drops in at a shop a few towns over where she meets a new boy her age working there. His name is Joe Willard. He is an orphan. He’s incredibly smart; but standoffish and a bit mysterious … and he’s also enrolled at Deep Valley High. Betsy is really intrigued by him, but she has a lot of other things on her mind once school gets underway. She’s very excited about this new experience of high school. 

AMY: She’s also very moody at times in that first, freshman-year book. She’s anxious about fitting in with “The Crowd,” which is the group of popular kids who hang out together pretty much daily. And we can also see Betsy gamely faking her way through things at times to try to fit in which is so relatable. Up to this point she has always prided herself on being a standout student, but she starts to let things slip in Heaven to Betsy — she gets caught up in the thrill of her popularity and she’s carried away by her fixation on the handsome “bad boy” of the group, Tony Markham. (She and her friends call him the T.D.S. for Tall Dark Stranger.)

KIM: I love that. That’s very realistic. So, Sadie, did you have any particular favorite moments from Heaven to Betsy that you want to share? 

SADIE: I mean, I don’t know… I don’t want to spoil too much of the plot is the thing, but there are moments about her agony over her crush on Tony which are truly painful and which she evokes so well. There’s the moment when they’re skating at the pond and she’s a bad skater and she just feels miserable and she finds herself talking too loudly and trying to be too jolly and to cover. And there’s also the added humiliation that her best friend and her sister can clearly tell what’s going on. And that memory of when the person you like likes someone else and there’s just nothing you can do about it. The heartsickness of it, I think, is so well evoked. And also, although they’re all so young, the crush feels plausible. Like, you can see how he’d be really appealing. And if you look at the picture of the boy on whom he was based (Mike Parker) he was a very handsome young man. And you know, she, like some of us, was young looking. I think she was physically probably a late bloomer, which they don’t get into explicitly, but I think in some ways she’s a little young for her age and that’s part of it. Feeling emotionally grown-up and mature and having these really romantic feelings, but not really being viewed that way yet by the larger world is a big part of this series, I think.

AMY: Lest we all think by this description she’s some sort of shrinking wallflower, no, she can flirt with the best of them, and she kind of knows that a lot of boys do like her.

SADIE: It’s true! She’s very comfortable with all these boys. They’re all pals. People really like her. She’s fun and friendly. The contrast is always drawn between her and her open friendliness, and she’s got this older sister, Julia, whom we haven’t mentioned, who is very poised and is very conventionally pretty; a wonderful big sister, but a hard act to follow. And she’s never pals with boys; everyone’s just slavishly in love with her. She’s an aspiring singer, as indeed Maud’s real-life, beautiful older sister was. So that’s also important to draw the distinction, that Maud is kind of… she gets along great with all these boys (and she can flirt) but she isn’t a mysterious siren in the way she necessarily would like to be.

AMY: Which is why in Heaven To Betsy she is practicing her “Ethel Barrymore droop.” So she’s walking around with a slink after her favorite movie star, which I thought was hilarious. So I had read the earlier books, but I don’t think I had ever made it all the way to these later books, and I loved getting to finally read them! I was struck right away by the fact that their teenage experience was pretty similar to my own in a lot of ways, despite the 100-year time difference basically. 

KIM: For sure. I mean, they were passing notes in class constantly, they were obsessed with their “pop music” of the day, they were speaking in slang, flirting with boys (as Amy talked about) and constantly calling each other on the phone. They were even taking “selfies” with their new-fangled Kodak cameras as well. So yeah, very similar.

AMY: Really behaving like stereotypical teenagers which, for some reason, surprised me. Because when I think of teenagers from the past, I usually go to the 1950s. I go to American Graffiti and Rebel Without A Cause, but I don’t necessarily think “Edwardian Era.” So Sadie, can you help put this into some historical context for us?

SADIE: I mean, this really is sort of the beginning of our idea of the modern American teenager, right, because people have leisure time. They were starting to have a little more money. Kids didn’t have to work. Kids were certainly (by Betsy’s era and in her class) expected to go on to higher education. Their parents wanted them to have fun and enjoy it, and the market was not slow to respond to this, and they already knew that this was a captive buying public. And there was a shared pop culture building at the same time that kids were being kind of liberated and encouraged to go on to more schooling, to stay in through high school. We really see that here. As you say, we think of it as kind of this Fifties thing, where people had rock-n-roll and it was post-war, but it pre-dated that.

AMY: Right. Kids were gabbing on the telephone… you had automobiles.

KIM: Yep.

SADIE: They’re all getting around, they’re starting to have real autonomy and a lot of freedom. And they aren’t getting up to anything too wild that we see in this group at least…

KIM: Absolutely. All you’re going to do is have fudge later. I mean…

AMY: I think I really would have loved being a teenager in this era as opposed to the one that I was in. I feel like I missed my decade!

KIM: I am so right there with you, Amy! A hundred percent. Totally. But I think all this actually really leads into what I wanted to bring up, which is Maud’s family (and hence the Rays in the novels) are actually very decidedly middle class, if not (I think in today’s world) upward middle class. We’re looking in on a world that’s very white and for the most part, financially secure. Not everyone during this time frame would have had the same idyllic experience that Betsy and her friends are having.

SADIE: Absolutely. I mean, you have such a picture of what it meant to be upwardly mobile at exactly this moment. Because on the one hand they’ve got a live-in maid/cook basically. They have the dressmaker coming to the house twice a year to make them new wardrobes. They are able to travel internationally. On the other hand, if you actually look at the house, which of course, is now a historic home in Mankato, the houses are very, very small by our standards. The amount of room they have is actually really modest. As you say, the town is very white… we’re not talking about Emily of Deep Valley, or the earlier books, but they allude to a community which was known as Little Syria which was full of Syrian immigrants. So on the margins you have that in their world. You also have the immigrant populations who are sometimes kind of peripherally showing up. Their English isn’t very good: Scandinavian or German. And they make this explicit again in Emily of Deep Valley (which is a spin-off book) which she did a lot of, I won’t call it “socially conscious” work, but she did a lot of work in it. And i think it’s not a coincidence that it’s not based on real things and that it’s not quite as good in certain ways. It doesn’t ring as true. It doesn’t feel as real as the others, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence, because Betsy’s world is not that. Betsy may have abutted it, but her world is a lot of parties. It is The Crowd, and even within the town, I think it’s a population that was largely transported from New England. They weren’t even of the Scandinavian population. Tib, certainly, is German, but that’s brought up a lot. They’re very consciously immigrants.

AMY: When I was reading, especially the sophomore book, because she goes to Milwaukee, right? She gets introduced to this whole German community and German culture, and she was actually writing these books in the Forties. There was probably some anti-German sentiment in the country at that time. It almost made me wonder if she was trying to do something there with Tib and trying to make people see, no, it’s actually a really nice community of people.

SADIE: A hundred percent. I think that’s very deliberate. And in fact, it’s explicit in Betsy’s Wedding, in which WWI breaks out, actually. She’s trying to be sensitive to Tib’s feelings. She’s like, “I know this must be a really hard time for you,” and Tib’s like, “Not really… we’re American and we’re really patriotic.” So she deals with that quite explicitly. They all join the military. They talk a lot about how warm the Germans are, how much family feeling they have. They’re kind of talking about a lot of the German propaganda and she has tremendous sympathy for the Belgians. But at the same time, she goes out of her way, as you say, to paint them as sympathetic, patriotic, friendly. I think you’re absolutely right that that bears mentioning.

KIM: I’m so glad you mentioned that, Amy, because I was wondering the same thing.

AMY: Yeah. Okay, so as we mentioned before, I would not have been part of “The Crowd,” sadly. I’d like to think I would be, but that was interesting too, because Betsy is basically hanging with the cool kids — the glitterati of Deep Valley High. And in modern YA literature, we’re kind of  used to seeing that script be flipped and having those cool kids be the antagonists of the stories. But Betsy’s crew is wholesome and kind-hearted, yet Lovelace does sort of paint Betsy’s position within “The Crowd” as a double-edged sword. Can you talk about that a little bit, Sadie?

SADIE: Yeah, Betsy is never unkind, and she always knows better, but there are moments when, in particular… well, in all of them, really… that’s kind of the ongoing tension such as it is. In Betsy in Spite of Herself, aptly titled, she starts going with a boy who’s quite sophisticated. He’s new in town. He’s a rich kid. He’s got a car — a red auto. And he kind of likes this more mysterious version of her, which isn’t really authentic to who she is. She’s a goofball, and she pretends to be remote and smooth and starts wearing this very heavy perfume all the time and wearing green even though it’s not really a great color for her, but she thinks it’s very mysterious. Sure enough, she can’t sustain it and then realizes she was unhappy. But then in the next book, her sister, Julia, goes off to the University of Minnesota and gets quite caught up in rushing for a sorority. And Betsy and her friends are very thrilled by this idea and they start their own sorority, and it’s great fun at first, but sure enough, they realize other people are being excluded. There’s one poignant scene where they’re at a football game — a Deep Valley football game. They’re all in kind of their matching outfits to show that they’re a sorority and the girl Hazel Smith, who’s a very academic girl and class officer and nice, comes over to start to talk to Betsy and then she sees this kind of phalanx of girls in their matching outfits and she backs off. And Betsy sort of has a pang. And at the end, a few of them have this realization, like, “You know what? Can we do something more inclusive and get to know maybe some other people?” It really takes till the end of the series for Betsy to completely learn this lesson, and I think a lot of that is illustrated by the plotlines of her relationship with Joe Willard and her relationship to her writing as embodied by the essay contest in which, as you mentioned, she competes almost every year. 

AMY: She comes to these realizations and that’s part of seeing her grow up and mature, but there’s a lot of angst surrounding this growing up that she’s doing. We see all the girls in the book seesaw between trying to act mature and then also just digging in their heels to hang on to what’s left of their childhood. You feel the clock ticking away in these four books, I think, and it makes it really bittersweet. What kinds of emotions do these books stir up for you, Sadie?

SADIE: They’re so comforting, but at the same time, it can almost be painful to read them. You have the character of Tacy, who’s Betsy’s best friend, who’s always juxtaposed against her as someone who’s not interested in boys; who’s clinging more stubbornly to their childhood; who won’t put her hair up in a pompadour or try to be artificially grown up. And yet, at the end, she’s the first one to become romantically serious about someone,and it is like a dagger to Betsy’s heart. It’s an older person; he’s not a boy, he’s a grown-up. He kind of comes into their world and tears her away. He’s clearly a good guy; he likes her for good reasons, but to have the real world intrude that way is awful. And the stakes rise (I won’t say imperceptibly) but a little bit with each book. It goes from her crush in the freshman year book to her having to really break someone’s heart senior year. The stakes are adult, and she feels the difference. She’s in some ways still playing a child’s game and other people are growing up and have real emotions that she’s toying with, for good and bad. She wants to keep things on a friend level and people are developing adult feelings. I think that is something that’s very relatable and very painful and moving, in a way. 

AMY: Lovelace writes: “They would never be quite so silly again. The foolish, crazy things they had done this year they would do less and less frequently until they didn’t do them at all. ‘We’re growing up,’ Betsy said aloud. She wasn’t even sure she liked it. But it happened, and then it was irrevocable. There was nothing you could do about it except try to see that you grew up into the kind of human being you wanted to be.” So very poignant.

SADIE: Yeah, and then of course, kind of “Anna Karenina”-style, you have the specter of WWI hanging over all this and the fact that all these boys would presumably have to go off to war.

KIM: I was thinking about that and then also just how early people married and started families and everything then, too. So those years where they were able to sort of live this idyllic, almost free, but yet safe, life — it was going to be short-lived for a lot of reasons, especially in that time. So it makes it even more emotional to hear those lines. 

AMY: Yeah, and like we said, the detail is so key to what Lovelace is doing. You would think it would get mundane (and there’s a lot of other novels where I don’t particularly enjoy when they get off into the weeds with describing things) but I never got tired of her describing even the smallest details in her life: getting dressed, having breakfast, how she did her hair.

She talks about her “Merry Widow hat,” for example, and I wound up Googling it for pictures to see exactly what that would have looked like. I loved all the specificity that she offered…. And then especially the constant running commentary on what they ate for special occasions and on picnics… I don’t know why it appealed to me so much, but it really did.

SADIE: And also, you get the sense the food at their house is particularly good because everyone’s always showing up. And of course they have their famous Sunday open houses known as “Sunday night lunch” at which her father makes his famous onion sandwiches. I think we’ve all tried them after reading it. He puts them on rye bread, butter, with mild Bermuda onions. And then a big pot of coffee and often a coconut cake. The ritual is very, very appealing. You assume they’re eating dinner really early every night. I think they probably keep kind of farm hours because then they always have appetites for fudge and stuff later in the evening. (The kids make a lot of fudge.) And in terms of the fashion, you really see how they shift every season, right? I mean the hemlines going up and down, the new style of hats, and how it would have been kind of awful to not be up to date. 

KIM: So in Betsy’s sophomore year, she gets involved with the new wealthy boy in town, Phil, and he ends up being a bit possessive, and he kind of separates her from her friends until she comes to realize it isn’t making her happy, and we alluded to it before, but she has a very close, platonic-but-borderline flirty relationships with so many of her guy friends, but this guy, Joe, he’s very mysterious and always in the back of her mind. He’s not part of “The Crowd.” He doesn’t flirt, and yet Betsy is really drawn to him.

AMY: Okay, Joe made me swoon so many times, I can’t even. She did a really good job.

KIM: Yeah, she did.

AMY: And that chemistry between a heroine and her love interest is kind of make-or-break, especially in young adult novels. It’s not easy to do — Kim and I have written YA. We always used to agonize over any of those sort of scenes, because if you don’t get them right it’s a real failure and it’s not going to make the book work. But yeah, Joe gave me major butterflies and the ending — oh my god — the senior year ending is just perfection! 

SADIE: Oh, absolutely. It’s such a slow burn, their relationship, and it’s a real meeting of intellectual equals and they really respect each other. Even when he’s at his most elusive, he’s clearly drawn to her. They always describe him as very proud because he doesn’t have much money. He has to work while they’re all partying and doing their sororities and stuff. He has multiple jobs. So there’s a real contrast drawn. And he’s one of the best writers and best students in the class, which, I mean, we all love that in a high school love interest. He also happens to be very handsome as well as the fact that he doesn’t date because he can’t really afford to makes him a real prize.

AMY: He’s unattainable.

KIM: Yes.

SADIE: Totally unattainable, and then, junior year when he does start dating a girl and it isn’t her, it is such a punch to the gut. I think she even says she’d always assumed that when Joe Willard got around to dating it would be her. She assumed they were fated, and I think as someone who’s had things come pretty easy to her, she just figured that would happen when he’d saved up enough money. But that is not how it works out. It’s the same year she’s in the sorority and at sort of her most off-puttingly flighty, and he goes for a very different kind of girl. Yes, ultimately, “Betsy and Joe” does happen (literally, it’s the fourth book) but it takes a long time, and the course of their true love does not run smoothly at all.

KIM: No, but the idea, as you said, of them bonding over their love of writing and literature was so great. And yet there’s another love story in this book. It doesn’t have anything to do with boys. Would you agree?

SADIE: Yeah, that fact… although she and Joe are rivals in the essay contest as you say, the romance of writing is a very separate one...although I think inextricably bound. I don’t think she could end up with someone who didn’t really respect her vocation and her talent, and that’s established from the beginning. So one thing she’s always serious about is her writing, and she’s disciplined about it. We see her always keeping the journals… she keeps sending her stories out, even when they’re not very good. She has a great work ethic about it, and she’s right, that’s what makes a writer. It’s the commitment, it’s not just the spark of genius. And in the essay contests, too, she sells herself short when she doesn’t prepare, and that’s one of the great plot points. The competition of the essay contests — that she and Joe are rivals in this and that sort of caps every year — is so wonderful. Another thing that I think is really nice about the books is how supportive her parents are of her ambition. Particularly the dad really takes seriously not just her ambition, but her sister’s ambition to be a performer. There’s never a moment when they question it or fail to support it financially or emotionally. As a reader, you have the luxury of taking that for granted, but when you think about it, in any era, it’s fantastic, let alone back then! It’s not even about believing in your dream — that’s not even questioned. They have such faith in her talent. They have such faith that she’ll do whatever she wants to do — that all of them will — and I think that’s lovely to read. 

KIM: Yeah, there’s something so egalitarian, actually, about them that I didn’t expect or remember. The way that the boys and girls in high school don’t feel… it doesn't feel as, I guess, sexist as you would think that time would feel. And her sister, Julia, is studying to be an opera singer and she’s going to be a writer. I think that does make it appealing to today’s readers, more than you would think.

AMY: The parents reminded me of 80s-sitcom parents. Like Elyse and Steven Keaton kept coming to mind from “Family Ties.” They were just so nice, but there were definitely comic elements where they were having to rush the dad out of the room when he was monopolizing the boys or just being an idiot.

KIM: Yeah.

AMY: They were definitely the cool house to congregate at.

SADIE: Exactly. Yeah.

AMY: I have a … she’s now an 11-year-old daughter, and a few years ago I downloaded the first few Betsy-Tacy books for her. Why do you think, Sadie, that these books still offer something for young women today?

SADIE: I think part of it is, as we said, how nice it is that they have gifts and talents which are encouraged. I think the female friendships are terrific in them, and the fact that she and her main friends, they never really fight or fall out. She and Tacy, in particular, are just completely supportive of each other in a way that is rare to find in life or literature, and which is part of what provides the stability and comfort of the series, I think. It’s not just her family; it’s Tacy, and it’s part of what makes it hard when they begin to move into the romantic world and get married. And then, just on a historical basis, it’s just such a perfect snapshot. It’s more, in that way, educational than anything I can think of. You come away with an exact portrait of a certain kind of girlhood, but that girlhood in that place and that moment … I don’t think there’s anything you don’t kind of have an idea about after reading these books. 

AMY: She mentions The Great Train Robbery is the movie that’s playing in the movie theater, you know? It’s really like picking up a newspaper almost, from those years and seeing how they lived. And actually, you talked about the real-life counterparts for a lot of these characters. So at the back of each of the Harper Perennial editions (which is the one that I read), they have a supplement which is photos of all of these real-life people and….

SADIE: Isn’t it so great?

AMY: It is! I mean, to be able to put a face… and you’re right, you’re like, “Yes, that is Tony…” It was fascinating. And I wound up finding out about a reunion that happened between the real-life Betsy, Tacy, Tib. So it was Maud and her two best friends…. What did you say, Bick? What were their names? I forget.

SADIE: Yeah, Bick and Midge. 

AMY: Bick and Midge, yes, so they returned to Mankato in 1961 with a lot of fanfare and press coverage to see Maud back in her hometown, and it was so sweet to see them together as really old ladies in all of these locations. We’ll link to that article in our show notes so that you can read it and also see all the photos. It’s really cool. 

SADIE: And I do highly recommend the Betsy-Tacy Society’s newsletter and website because they’ve really done the legwork, and it’s really satisfying to see what the real people looked like. And also you’re like, “Oh! Julia was really beautiful as a real person!” Or “The real-life Joe Willard is very attractive!” It’s really what she says. She’s not exaggerating. It’s not fondness and projecting. People are very accurately described, and not just the ones who are very good-looking, but everyone conforms to her descriptions. She’s an accurate, faithful correspondent. 

KIM: So Sadie, before we wrap up, we wanted to ask you about your bespoke book curation.

SADIE: Sure!

KIM: We wanted to hear about it; it sounds so cool!

SADIE: Basically, if someone has a library, a shelf, a gift, and they write to S.O.S. Library (for so it’s called) and say, “I want four shelves on ‘fly-fishing’ for a 25th anniversary gift,” we will put this together. Anything you want, whether it’s mid-century obscure female novelists, whether it is something on a very particular era of art history… we can find academic books. What I love to do best is give a wide range of books. Some of the most fun commissions can be, “Just go crazy. I just want fun reads for the beach, a little bit weird and ideally they should involve travel on the Riviera. So give me 15 books.”

KIM: That sounds like a dream come true.

SADIE: It’s a lot of fun.

KIM: Thank you so much, Sadie! That was one of the most fun, wonderful conversations. That was lovely. Absolutely lovely.

SADIE: I could talk about these books forever and will and do, and thank you guys so much! I learned a lot too, and I’m so glad you asked that question about… I had never really thought about how she wrote about the German population, for instance. It’s so fun to have to think about this a little more critically and thoughtfully and assess why you love something. So thank you for that opportunity.

AMY: This was like the next-best thing to a Sunday night lunch!

SADIE: I know! And I’m hungry now. I’m sure you are too.

KIM: Yes, yes, go eat some fudge!

AMY: Thank you for joining us.

SADIE: Bye-bye, guys!

AMY: So we’ll sign off now, but don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter, where we’ll occasionally be giving out sneak-peek info on which books we’ll be featuring in future episodes. (You can get a jump on your reading if you’re inclined to read along with us.)

KIM: And as always, check out our website, Lostladiesoflit.com for a transcript of this show and further information.

AMY: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone and our logo was designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew.