A Little Country Girl

Candace Arden has never seen the ocean. Orphaned early, she grew up on a farm in the Connecticut hills near North Tolland, raised by an elderly great-aunt who approved of her mainly for being a quiet child. Then an invitation arrives from a rich cousin. Candace travels alone down Narragansett Bay on the little steamer Eolus to Newport, where Cousin Kate and her three daughters are opening a season of dinner parties, cliff walks, and picnics. She turns seventeen there, learning the rules of a fashionable table and, more painfully, that her cousins are half ashamed of her. Susan Coolidge, who had lived in Newport since 1870, wrote this 1885 story with a light hand. The country girl is never the joke, and the polished family has as much to learn as she does.