Betty Leicester

Sarah Orne Jewett wrote this 1890 story for girls centered on Betty Leicester, a fifteen-year-old who spends a summer at Tideshead, a quiet New England village, while her father travels in Alaska. Left in the care of her grandaunts Barbara and Mary, Betty renews old friendships (among them one with Mary Beck) and slowly finds her footing among the neighbors after years of living abroad. The plot stays close to ordinary life: garden visits, village errands, small kindnesses, and the patient work of learning to belong. Jewett’s affection for the Maine countryside and the people who fill it shows on nearly every page. Readers who know her adult fiction will recognize the same clear eye for regional character, scaled here for younger readers. It remains a warm, unhurried portrait of girlhood in nineteenth-century rural America.