When Grandmamma Was New

In the spring of 1899, at sixty-eight, Marion Harland set down the stories she had been telling her grandsons beside the library fire at Sunnybank. The title came from five-year-old Fritz, who said what he liked best was hearing about what happened when Grandmamma was new. Seventeen chapters follow a girl called Molly through a Powhatan County, Virginia childhood of the 1830s and 1840s: a jealous rage in which she destroys her prim cousin’s new doll Rozillah, a full funeral and burial in the family graveyard for her own battered rag doll Musidora, a haunted lumber room, a first lie and its consequences. Harland treats a child’s conscience, grief and truth-telling as serious business. The household she remembers is a slaveholding one, and the book carries the attitudes and language of its period.