Betty Cavanna

Betty Cavanna wrote fiction and nonfiction for youth during a career begun in the 1940s. Passport to Romance, published by William Morrow in 1955, follows fifteen-year-old Jody after her widowed father sends her to school in Switzerland so that she can become more independent. The journey introduces unfamiliar customs, friendships, school life, and a boy Jody first meets aboard ship. Cavanna uses travel as part of the character’s education, allowing homesickness and curiosity to reshape Jody’s relationship with her father. Paul Galdone illustrated the original edition, placing the book within the mid-century American tradition of illustrated novels for teenage girls. Cavanna’s broader bibliography moved between school stories, horse books, mysteries, and titles about children in other countries. Her repeated attention to work, hobbies, place, and growing responsibility gave readers protagonists whose choices extend beyond courtship. Passport to Romance is therefore both a coming-of-age story and an example of how her fiction used travel to widen a young character’s sense of possibility.