The Meadow-Brook Girls by the Sea; Or, The Loss of The Lonesome Bar

The Meadow Brook Girls by the Sea, Or The Loss of the Lonesome Bar is a girls’ adventure novel by Janet Aldridge, one of the entries in the Meadow Brook Girls series that ran across the second decade of the twentieth century. The series, published by the Akron based Saalfield Publishing Company, followed a group of four schoolgirls, Harriet Burrell, Jane McCarthy, Margery Brown, and Hazel Holland, through a long sequence of outdoor adventures organised around camping, hiking, and other outdoor pursuits across various American settings.

In this volume the four girls are spending their summer holiday at the seaside, where they encounter the various adventures that the coastal setting offers. The story involves a small drama centered on a sailing trip, with the loss of the Lonesome Bar of the subtitle serving as the central incident around which the plot is built. There are sequences of sailing and boating activity, mild physical danger that the girls handle with the combination of practical competence and moral courage that the series consistently emphasized, and the kind of small mystery elements that gave the books their appeal to young readers of the period.

The Meadow Brook Girls series belonged to the substantial body of early twentieth century American girls’ fiction that was attempting to present active outdoor adventure as a legitimate sphere for young women. The series followed the example of similar boys’ adventure series like the Outdoor Chums and the Boy Scouts books that were enormously popular during the same period, adapting the formula to a female readership that was increasingly being encouraged to take part in the outdoor recreation movement of the early twentieth century. The girls in the series go camping, hiking, sailing, horseback riding, and otherwise participate in activities that earlier American girls’ fiction had largely reserved for boys.

Janet Aldridge was a pseudonym used by one or more writers in the Saalfield company’s stable of pseudonymous series writers, in the manner that was common in early twentieth century children’s series publishing. The books were produced according to a formula and at a steady pace to meet the continuing demand of young readers for new entries in the series.

The book is short, perhaps two hundred pages, and reads quickly. For readers interested in early twentieth century American girls’ series fiction, this is a representative example. It pairs naturally with the other Meadow Brook Girls volumes.