Molly Brown’s College Friends

Molly Brown’s College Friends 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. The Molly Brown books followed the title character from her Kentucky home through her years at Wellesley College and into her early adult life, with the various entries focused on different stages of Molly’s education and her widening world of friendships and adventures.

This particular entry focuses on Molly’s college friends, the wider circle of young women that her years at Wellesley have brought into her life. The college friendship as a literary subject was significant in the early twentieth century, when American higher education was opening to women in significant numbers and the experience of the women’s college had become an important formative experience for an entire generation of educated American women. The bonds formed at Wellesley, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, and the other elite women’s colleges of the era often defined the social and professional networks of their graduates for decades afterward, and the girls’ college fiction of the period reflected and helped to shape this experience for the younger readers who were preparing to enter that world themselves.

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 captured the warmth and the seriousness of the women’s college experience with the kind of detail that her readers responded to. 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 Molly Brown of Speed’s series 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 does not always make easy to maintain. The friendships she builds across her college years and the friendships that continue into her adult life form the recurring subject of the connected novels in the series.

For scholars of children’s literature, of girls’ series fiction, or of early twentieth century American educational culture, Speed’s Molly Brown books are essential.