Molly Brown of Kentucky

Molly Brown of Kentucky is one of the books in Nell Speed’s Molly Brown series, the long running girls’ college fiction sequence that ran alongside her better known Tucker Twins series in the early twentieth century. Nell Speed was the pen name of Emma Speed Sampson, an American author who wrote a number of long running series for young readers, particularly girls, in the period roughly 1909 through 1925. Her Molly Brown books followed the title character from her Kentucky home through her years at Wellesley College and into her early adult life.

Molly Brown of Kentucky is one of the entries set during Molly’s home years rather than her college years, when the action is grounded in the Kentucky setting that Speed knew personally and rendered with the kind of regional affection that her readers appreciated. The Kentucky of Speed’s fiction is the rural and small town Kentucky of the early twentieth century, with its specific traditions of hospitality, family connection, and the slow rhythms of agricultural life that the modernizing pressures of the era were beginning to change.

Speed writes in the breezy chapter book style typical of girls’ series fiction of the era, with brisk plotting, light moralizing, and a clear sense of who her audience is. The novel is meant for girls aged roughly twelve to seventeen and was designed to be both entertaining and improving in the slightly didactic mode of the period. Molly herself is a particular kind of early twentieth century heroine. Intelligent, ambitious, generous, and grounded in the values of her Kentucky upbringing in ways that the wider world she encounters at college and beyond does not always make easy to maintain.

The Molly Brown series fit into the larger landscape of girls’ college fiction that became popular in the early twentieth century alongside the Stratemeyer Syndicate series and the various independent series like Speed’s. These books reflected and helped to shape the changing expectations for young women’s education and ambitions in the era when American higher education was opening to women in significant numbers. Molly Brown of Kentucky is a representative entry in the series and a fair sample of the genre.

For scholars of children’s literature, of girls’ series fiction, or of early twentieth century American educational culture, Speed’s work is part of the larger story of how the modern young adult genre developed.