Molly Brown’s Sophomore Days

Molly Brown’s Sophomore Days is one of the books in Nell Speed’s Molly Brown series, the long running girls’ college fiction sequence that follows the title character through her years at Wellesley College. The sophomore days entry covers Molly’s second year at Wellesley, after she has completed the freshman adjustment and is settling into the college community as an established member of the wider student body.

The sophomore year was traditionally a slightly less dramatic year than the freshman or senior years in the four year American college sequence, with the central characters being neither newly arrived nor approaching graduation. Speed uses this middle period to develop the friendships, the academic interests, and the social complications that the wider Molly Brown series builds out across the connected entries.

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. Her Molly Brown books captured the warmth and seriousness of the women’s college experience for the young female readers of the early twentieth century.

For scholars of children’s literature or of girls’ series fiction, Speed’s work is essential. Many of her books are now in the public domain.