Peggy

Fresh from an Ohio prairie farm, Peggy Montfort arrives at Miss Russell’s school in Pentland capable, plain-spoken, and entirely unprepared for the social machinery of a girls’ academy. She would rather study birds than literature, and her manners mark her out among classmates who care about dress and rank. Richards builds the book from small school incidents: a box from Fernley House that turns a bare room into something like home, a classmate named Lobelia Parkins whom the sophomores torment until Peggy steps in, the steady friendship of the juniors who call themselves the Owls. Published in 1899 as the third of the Margaret books, it catches the American girls’ school story while the form was still settling. Richards, who later shared the first Pulitzer Prize for Biography with her sister, wrote girls as they actually are: awkward, loyal, unfinished.