Pollyanna

Summary

Pollyanna Whittier, eleven years old, is the orphaned daughter of a poor missionary minister in the American West. Her mother, Jennie, had long ago disappointed her proud New England family by marrying the young minister instead of a wealthy suitor. When her father dies, the Ladies' Aid that cared for them sends Pollyanna east to her only relative, her mother's sister Miss Polly Harrington, a stiff, dutiful and wealthy spinster of Beldingsville, Vermont, who takes her in purely out of duty. Miss Polly puts her in a bare attic room and sets her a strict timetable of sewing, music, reading and cooking. Pollyanna is delighted with everything anyway. She explains to the maid Nancy the 'glad game' her father taught her: when a missionary barrel brought a pair of child's crutches instead of the doll she had hoped for, he showed her she could be glad because she did not need them. The game is to find something to be glad about in everything, and the harder it is, the better the fun. Pollyanna wins over the household servants, Nancy, Old Tom the gardener and his son Timothy, and then the town. She visits Mrs. Snow, a complaining invalid who has kept to her bed for years, and coaxes her into letting her hair be arranged and into taking an interest in life. She makes friends with John Pendleton, the gruff, rich recluse called the Man, and finds him in Pendleton Woods with a broken leg, fetching help and the young physician Dr. Chilton. She befriends Jimmy Bean, a runaway from an orphans' home, and pleads with Aunt Polly and then with the Ladies' Aid to give him a home. Pendleton eventually confesses that he loved Pollyanna's mother and asks Pollyanna to live with him, but she will not leave her aunt, and she persuades him to take Jimmy instead. Her talk of her father's eight hundred 'rejoicing texts' turns the discouraged minister, the Rev. Paul Ford, from a sermon of rebuke to one of encouragement. Then Pollyanna is struck by a motor car, and a famous specialist, Dr. Mead, finds an injury to the spine with paralysis from the hips down. When she overhears that she may never walk again, Pollyanna cannot play her game, and the whole town, one visitor after another, comes to tell Miss Polly how the child taught them to be glad. Jimmy tells Miss Polly that Dr. Chilton knows of a doctor who might help, and that only pride keeps her from calling him. Miss Polly sends for Chilton, whom she had loved and quarrelled with years before, and they are reconciled. The book ends with Pollyanna's letter from a sanitarium: she has walked six steps, and her aunt has married Dr. Chilton at her bedside. The novel first appeared as a weekly serial in The Christian Herald and was published in book form by L. C. Page of Boston in 1913.

Top Lessons

• Looking for the good on purpose

  Pollyanna's game is not pretending that bad things are good; it is a habit of searching each hard thing for a real reason to be thankful. It began with a disappointed little girl and a pair of unwanted crutches, and it works because she practises it. The book shows gladness as something learned and chosen.

• Duty and love

  Miss Polly does everything that duty asks: she gives Pollyanna a room, food, lessons and rules. What she does not give at first is affection. As Pollyanna's love wins her over, the attic room becomes a real bedroom, and duty becomes love.

• A house is not a home

  John Pendleton says that it takes a woman's hand and heart, or a child's presence, to make a home. Pendleton, Dr. Chilton and Jimmy Bean all lack a home, and the story ends by giving each of them one. Pollyanna keeps her promise to her aunt and finds a home for Jimmy instead.

• When the cheerful one needs help

  After her accident Pollyanna cannot play her own game. Then the people she helped come to help her, and Jimmy has the courage to tell Miss Polly a hard truth. Gladness, the book shows, is passed back and forth among friends.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

The novel is full of early twentieth-century medicine: a chronic invalid kept to her bed and darkened room, a broken leg set by a country doctor, a city specialist called in consultation, a spinal injury with paralysis from the hips down, and a long stay at a distant sanitarium. Dr. Chilton's repeated joke that Pollyanna is a tonic he wishes he could prescribe like pills makes the book an easy entry point for the history of ideas about mood, encouragement and recovery, from the mind-cure movements of Porter's New England to later research on optimism and placebo response; any such link is a modern reading. Mrs. Snow's long invalidism, in which complaint has become a way of life, can be read alongside period ideas of nervous invalidism without asserting a diagnosis. The cure of Pollyanna's paralysis is told as a child would hear it, with no medical detail of the treatment.

• Chapters VIII and X

  Pollyanna's visits to the bedridden Mrs. Snow, who wants whatever she has not been brought, until Pollyanna arranges her hair and shows her a mirror.

• Chapter XV

  Dr. Chilton says the child is better than any tonic and wishes he could prescribe her for his patients.

• Chapters XXIII-XXVI

  The motor-car accident, Miss Polly's account to Pendleton of an injury to the spine with paralysis from the hips down, and the specialist Dr. Mead's consultation.

• Chapters XXXI-XXXII

  Pollyanna is sent to a sanitarium run by a friend of Dr. Chilton and, after nearly ten months, writes that she has walked.