The Carter Girls

The Carter Girls is the foundational novel of Nell Speed’s Carter Girls series, the connected girls’ fiction project that ran alongside her better known Tucker Twins and Molly Brown series in the early twentieth century. The Carter Girls of the title are the central young female characters whose various adventures and relationships drive the wider series across multiple 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, in the period roughly 1909 through 1925. Her various series 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.

The Carter Girls series develops the kind of warm sister and friend dynamics that the wider girls’ series fiction tradition relied on, with the various entries following the connected cast through their school years and into early adulthood. The series fit into the larger landscape of girls’ series fiction that became popular in 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.