Molly Brown’s Orchard Home

Molly Brown’s Orchard Home is one of the books in Nell Speed’s Molly Brown series, the long running girls’ college fiction sequence that continued the title character’s story past her Wellesley years and into her early adult life. The Molly Brown books followed the title character from her Kentucky home through her years at Wellesley College and into the various stages of her early adult life, with the orchard home of this title pointing to a particular Kentucky property or setting that becomes the central location for the novel.

The post college entries in the Molly Brown series gave Speed room to develop the character’s adult life beyond the college setting that the early books had focused on. Marriage, professional ambitions, family responsibilities, and the wider engagement with the early twentieth century American world that her education had prepared her for all become the subjects of the later Molly Brown novels. The orchard home setting suggests a specific Kentucky property where Molly’s adult life is being built, with the agricultural and rural connotations of an orchard fitting the wider Kentucky context that Speed used as the foundation for her character.

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 college experience and of the early adult life of an educated American woman of the era 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 her wider education and adult experiences have only deepened rather than displaced. The friendships she built across her college years and the relationships that continue into her adult life form the recurring subject of the connected novels in the series, with each entry developing the wider Molly Brown world while focusing on the particular situation that drives the individual book.

The Molly Brown books fit into the larger landscape of girls’ series fiction that became popular in the early twentieth century alongside the Stratemeyer Syndicate series and the various independent series. For scholars of children’s literature, of girls’ series fiction, or of early twentieth century American women’s experience, Speed’s work is part of the larger story of how the modern young adult genre developed.